Message Boards and Crawlers

How to make phpBB google friendly.

[ds98127]

New to this forum .
That said i have a request..Could someone throw more light on how to make phpBB message boards indexed by google... I was just wondering that if the read permissions are not allowed for non registered users then google will probably never index the pages.
However i saw a website wherein google could index the pages behind the password protection area. me baffled ..it was a v2 bulletin board though.
Further any links on how to promote these message boards shall be a great help ..
cheers
Niko
P.S i hope this post makes it :-)

[Yidaki]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], ds98127!

Here are some good threads that explain how to make phpbb google friendly:
phpbb, sessions & google [google.com]

At the following thread i posted a working code for session.php to allow google to crawl your board:
[webmasterworld.com...] (msg#:7)

Re: Crawling login areas:
With some advanced modification of phpbb's authorization routines / sessions, you might be able to let google even crawl restricted areas that require users to login. However, it doesn't make much sense since people could look at google's cache of your board pages without logging in. You'd have to cloak to avoid this.

[ds98127]

Thanks ..
I have phpBB 2.0.6 and the 2.0.4 updates are still compatible.
cheers

[ds98127]

Code:

#
#-----[ OPEN ]------------------------------------------
#
includes/sessions.php

#
#-----[ FIND ]------------------------------------------
#
$SID = 'sid=' . $session_id;

#
#-----[ REPLACE WITH ]------------------------------------------
#
if ( $userdata['session_user_id']!= ANONYMOUS ){
$SID = 'sid=' . $session_id;
} else {
$SID = '';
}

hi, the above is the code i tried and it works well unless anonymous posting is allowed.
There is a good thread on automated site map genration with pros and cons , and meta tags generation for each post at the following url

[phpbb.com...]

I hope i am not making a mistake with this url
cheers
niko