Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Use of the noindex + follow tags on every page besides your index page and actual article pages will leave you with mean looking search results. No junk being indexed seems to be a great thing and pages with nothing but links to your other pages is in all honesty junk to search engines most of the time.
Enter forums however. On a new site I found that without a long established and well linked to main index page your site will simply not have the pr to push down to the actual topics level and so the engines bog down in your index and forum list pages without getting to any meat. This is a good recipe for lots of supplemental.
Supplemental isn't a bad thing, honestly 90% of forum posts tend to be of poor content in one way or another but some of the discussions merrit being indexed, they just likely never will be well indexed with a standard forum.
Links to the best articles is possibly one solution but I'm looking for more. I want to add the "follow, noindex" tags to the forum index and viewforum sections and only allow the actual threads to be indexed. It takes some work but locking down a good thread that hasn't been posted to in a while but turns up in the search engines as non supplemental is a good thing. A seperate forum sitemap is also a good thing.
Phpbb forums use an overall header so adding tags to it would result in all pages getting tagged. Its possible to move all of the content out of the head section and into the individual sections like viewforum and viewtopic but its a lot of work because of the extra sections like register, search etc..etc.
Is there a mod that allows forums to set a different meta tag for each section depending on your needs?
Robots.txt is of no help because it apparently acts as a nofollow tag so anything at a lower level is blocked as well.
I've searched phpbb.com and haven't found a good solution. I'm honestly considering adding a /forum to my robots.txt file to lock out the forums completely and to hand chose the better threads and archive them elsewhere somehow.
I need specific phpbb answers here, this problem shouldn't be this frustrating. Just leaving the junk pages to be listed isn't an option for me.
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