phpBB PageRank is Nothing Outside of Homepage

[EliteWeb]

Is anyone else noticing on their phpBB sites that outside of the homepage there is no pagerank now. I have 10 sites and it is the same on all of them. Is this something new? I remember pagerank on them before, they are still cached, just no PR. Not a Zero PR, just no PR.

[DRGather]

General consensus is that Google screens out phpBB's on interior pages. I haven't seen many with any PR at all aside from the phpbb.com site.

[JasonHamilton]

I just checked -- even phpbb webpages that have several non forum links have 0 page rank (white bar, not gray)

[EliteWeb]

When did this start happening?

[DRGather]

I know most sites I frequent have been this way since before Florida.

[yvt360]

Confirmed here. We had pr on interior pages of our php in the past, just white now.

[NazaretH]

Even phpBB.com's own forum has the same problem :( ... even though they're a PR10 site

[edited by: NazaretH at 5:42 am (utc) on Dec. 29, 2003]

[nefarious]

On my site today I noticed my dynamic pages with a? were showing a PR 0 (ASP pages). It may be related. Try this:

Do a G.Search for one of those inner pages that appears to have no PR. Click-through to the page, and see if PR appears. For mine, that restores the PR.

I have no idea why, though.

[Jenstar]

There is speculation that Google is somehow PR filtering pages with viewforum.php and viewtopic.php Doing a mod_rewrite is one of the "possible" solutions, but since this is a fairly new problem, there hasn't been confirmation (that I am aware of) that this solution actually works.

It also appears that only the forum index page is capable of passing PR and showing up in a backlink check. But viewforum.php and viewtopic.php pages are still showing up in the Google serps for searches.

[EliteWeb]

I see the pages are indexed, even cached just no ranking. I do agree with jenstar that viewtopic and viewforum have a filter in place. What would it take to rename and have the links goto another .php for these that are not standard?
The FAQ, the Login, all the other pages have ranking just those two, which are the heart of the content.

[Jenstar]

Interesting, I hadn't noticed the FAQ pages etc were ranking - even the sub-index pages show PR, as do all search pages. Definitely the viewtopic.php and viewforum.php are showing.

Backlinks are no longer showing up from the memberlist (the URL listed by members used to show in their backlinks from that memberlist page) despite the page being PR4+ - not sure if PR is still being passed though.

phpbb.com has a ton of information on using mod_rewrite on these boards, altough I have not tried it myself. And I am not sure how it would handle any upgrades and/or adding mods/hacks.

[GoogleGuy]

I'm not aware of any changes for phpBB pages; the search inurl:viewforum gives 500K+ results back, so I think we're doing an okay job of crawling those pages. I can believe something could have changed on url canonicalization/rewrites so that the toolbar queries for a different form of the url than we have indexed, but I don't think this indicates problems with phpbb, crawling those forums, or assigning pagerank during indexing; more likely it's only an issue with the toolbar PR request. I'll pass on the report to the toolbar folks, but I wouldn't worry about using phpBB on your site.

[nakulgoyal]

Thanks GoogleGuy!This removed the worries of most of us...I would say all of us. :-(

[doc_z]

I think, it's an old problem related to dynamic pages: Dynamic site and Page Rank [webmasterworld.com]

[dirkz]

It would all be a lot easier if all PHP programmers knew about PR and would design their webapps to look static and REQUIRE a mod_rewrite :)

Especially the wide-spread ones. I don't want to dig deep in PHP if I want to use it.

[DRGather]

The new version of phpBB (2.2) is supposed to be written more SE friendly, but I don't think modrewrite was one of the additions. I *think* they're only implementing some cloaking to drop the SID's for the spiders (which btw is probably your FIRST problem getting a board indexed if you haven't corrected it yet.) The control panel is supposed to have an SE section where you can control how spiders see your board.

Modrewrite would be hard to implement on a standard basis in a release such as phpBB, but certainly not impossible. At a minimum it would be nice to have a decent tutorial on the subject, as most of the ones out there specifically for phpBB are pretty convoluted.

[dvduval]

My phpbb pages seem to be getting indexed and ranked fine even though they have zero pare rank.

[TomWaits]

When I need to do seaches of phpBB boards (and I need to frequently), I go to AlltheWeb, they do an outstanding job of indexing them. I don't run a phpBB board (or any board), so objectively when I look at what Google spits out and AlltheWeb, it's not even a fair fight.

[doc_z]

Once again: Normally, there are no problems with this kind of dynamic pages (Of course, it depends on the number of parameters and names used.). They get PR, back links are shown and they are ranked as normal. Just the PR displayed in the toolbar isn't correct. It seems that the query is truncated after the?. Therefore, the toolbar doesn't distinguish between these pages and show incorrect PR.

[DRGather]

Normally, there are no problems with this kind of dynamic pages (Of course, it depends on the number of parameters and names used.). They get PR, back links are shown and they are ranked as normal.

This isn't the case with phpBB (although it is in most others). phpBB appends a variable called "sid" to the end of every url to pass the session id which pretty much everyone agrees will divert Gbot to greener pastures. I'm not saying that Gbot WON'T spider them at all, I'm just saying it's a bit leary of them. Any variable with the letter combo ID seems to trigger this behavior. Every site I've seen that quit using id as a variable had a significant improvement in spider activity and depth of crawl after the change.

See GG comments on the subject here [webmasterworld.com] message 6 and
here also [webmasterworld.com] message 4

IMO getting rid of sids is essential to getting decent rankings on a forum. Look at this forum for heavens sake. Do you see many (if any) dynamic urls? Why do you think it ranks so well and has great PR when other boards just as large and popular don't?

As far as the viewtopic and viewforum files.... who knows? Some people believe that dynamic pages are automatically weighted less heavily than static just as a function of being dynamic. GG says they're not penalized outright so maybe that portion is simply a function of the dynamic url problem. Nobody knows for sure. In either case, modrewrite fixes it.

[dirkz]

GG says they're not penalized outright so maybe that portion is simply a function of the dynamic url problem.

Dynamic URLs are crawled more "cautiously", according to a Google employer.

[g1smd]

>> It would all be a lot easier if all PHP programmers knew about PR and would design their webapps to look static and REQUIRE a mod_rewrite :) <<

Yeah, and none of the forum programmers seem to fully understand ALL of the issues regarding time zones, and Daylight Savings Time on a GLOBAL basis.

[percentages]

GoogleGuy, any chance of an update regarding what the toolbar guys discovered?

[SirFroggZ]

My phpbb forum has a pr of 4 and all my interior pages have a 1.

[dirkz]

> My phpbb forum has a pr of 4 and all my interior pages have a 1.

Are session IDs enabled?