[INFO] How gogle PHPBB!

[Jesse_tyler]

So...how do i exactly have it where the search bots can see my phpBB board? because i have seen alot on installation like stuff on these pages *is confused*

[Antony]

So the forum you mean is the one, which is part of phpbbhacks.com? (I'm new here, as you know, so can't see any clues yet). I guess you ment some other place, cause 500 visitors seems little for such an active place. Like I have a forum at http://forum.acidics.com with 8 posts a day on average but 200 unique visitors coming from the main acidics.com site and other places (not SE yet). Maybe it's just that your audience is more active.

Still I can't get *did you mean to say you have 3-4 entries for Google in daily logs or whether each forum page is hit by Google 3-4 times*? Which of the two?

BTW I tried checking your site in the profile; it won't load.

My site, is not a part of phpBBHacks.com, but I do offer a lot of support over there as the second highest poster.
I track my referals to a block on my main page, I get about 50 posts a day. But I have last visit installed, and logs on average anywere between 300-800 hits perday.
And my server had just rebooted, that's why it wouldn't load.

Google, comes along in a set of about 5 and indexs like crazy a few times a day.
Never fails to come around, I also have meta tags coded within overall_header.tpl

[mr.luc]

it drives me crazy... the boards been up for 4 weeks
for the last 3 weeks i got spidered
18 times scooter
8 times alexa
14 times google

alexa is on it now going through the memberlist (its better than nothing)

looks good... but
i don't appear in any of them..
grrrrrrrr.

but they keep coming back!!!
ok.. i got good sites linking to me.. so even without being listed i got 250 new members in those 3 weeks, but still i would prefer being listed!

[Antony]

I disalow indexing memberlist.php stops emails getting harvested.

[Acid Paul]

2 Jesse_tyler: Relax, people are talking that much about Google mods just cause they like to talk (so do I). There are three nice mods, you can choose any one of them, weight for a month or two and see your site in Google database - one mod is on page 20 of this thread and two more in this article: http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article.php?article_id=29
+ read about SEO at http://www.highrankings.com

2 x_789: so the mod works actually? That's fine! As I've said I'm using mod #1 (from the knowledge database) and I'm quite sure it's doing the job right; I've checked how the site looks for user_agent Google - no SIDs and that's enough for me. Now wait for 1-2 month.

Frankly, I don't see how Google can bring lots of traffic to the forum through search listings - forums usually aren't that well optimized, meta data is least helpful here (though I'll try to optimize .tpl files). My ultimate goal is to push as many forum pages into Google database as possible cause each page has a link to my main site www.acidics.com (the forum is on a subdomain and is perceived as a separate site) - this means plenty outbound links and higher PR for the basic site which is optimized for SEs. If the forum harvests traffic from SEs, that's fine, but it'll be a surprise to me.

2 Antony: I get more and more dubious. Maybe we're using different terminology? "Hit" means request to any file - gif, htm, txt, zip... "Page view" means requests to page files - php, htm, shtm, xml... Thus 300 hits with 50 posts is very strange, maybe there're just no more than 5 people posting. So how many hits do you get from Google and for how long is it going on? It's very difficult for me to believe that Google can reindex the whole site several times a day or even a week like mr.luc said - I have some experience optimizing static pages and have never seen such behavior, but I must admit the issue with dynamic pages can be all different. Maybe it's connected with the late Google sundrom? Yesterday Google hit my forum files 15 times, that's reasonable; it must be getting ready for a major crawl.

2 mr.luc: you aren't in search results cause they get updated on a monthly-bimonthlly basis. Here's a helpful site which also links to other great places about SEO - http://www.highrankings.com]

Alexa (useragent ia_archiver) is a mad thing. It may index your site when someone comes to it through alexabar-outfitted browser and can behave really nasty. FYI what this spider finds is used to make an archive at alexa but search results are taken from Google. You can disallow Alexa in robots.txt and you'll naver sacrifice any traffic, just save bandwidth. With 800-1000 visitors daily to acidics.com (about 180 referred by Google) I've never ever had a single visit from alexa.

[Acid Paul]

You can disallow showing members' email in general forum configuration. Email will only be visibly to admins and maybe mods, as well as if the member deliberately make it visible by changing setting in their profile.

BTW Antony, I have to say you have an excellent site. Really impressive, you must be putting much effort in it.

[Captain Pervert]

Acid Paul, thanks for your clarification.
You have pointed me in the right direction and I'm going optimize the pages for as much as possible and, of course, give it time.

I always had in mind - apparently I read that somewhere, years ago - that it takes 1-2 months to get indexed. That's why I was really excited when I discovered that my forum index was already indexed after less than a week, and at the same time disappointed that the rest of teh forum was not.

I'll wait and see.

Keep up the good work guys.

[Antony]

Google visits my site around 3 times each day.
I can't show you without giving you access to my server logs, but it is there, and thanks about the site.

I am still learning php.

[doggroups]

Frankly, I don't see how Google can bring lots of traffic to the forum through search listings - forums usually aren't that well optimized, meta data is least helpful here (though I'll try to optimize .tpl files).

Actually I am always surprised by what people search for. We recieve a lot of direct forum traffic for terms we would never think to optimize.

I would not worry about Meta as Google does not take them into account, although they are worth while for Inktomi.

[Acid Paul]

2 doggroups - well you are quite right. SEO is a wonderfull thing - you optimize you pages for one term and get heaps of requests with keyword phrases, which would never come into your or Wordtracker's mind. Like I get a lot of traffick to acidics.com from "online work" which I really never thought to optimize for not speaking of 6-8 word long combinations.

I believe you are right, forums with really very many threads can get lots of traffic from SEs on highly targeted (that means long) and not heavily competitive phrases - a couple to this thread, one more to this - hundreds and thousands of visits all on all. As a general rule such phrases mean more loyal visitors and that's nice about forums. Next you think how to handle all this traffic .

[Acid Paul]

Google visits my site around 3 times each day.
I can't show you without giving you access to my server logs, but it is there, and thanks about the site.

I guess I understand it now - 3 entries for Google in an average day is reasonable. And the question with logs is interesting. Do you know places where people share their logs for others to see how their sites evolved or how SEO efforts helped in bringing in more traffic? I could share my logs as well by posting them as regular files for download, but my logs keep records for both the main site and the subdomain and one needs to spend a decent amount of time tuning log-program filters to analyze statistics for either forum, or the main site. It's weird %-)

2 Captain Pervert: Thanks for appreciating my posts. It's nice to hear that someone learned from them. As soon as I get my own forum in the Google database and study SE traffic to it for the nearest 2-3 month, I'll try making a large in-depth post covering all of the PHPBB issues with Google - just to store all the great ideas in one place. Because it's not fun rummaging through thousands of posts to find valuable info.

Actually I chose PHPBB software for my forum cause I sensed it would be easier to rank higher with it than with other free forums like Invision Board or the old players. PHPBB is really cool.

[Captain Pervert]

So did I.
Because UBB's .cgi files didn't get indexed.

And I totally agree with doggroups. People search for the weirdest things. On my (Dutch) site we have a story about a camping vacation. One of my friends had an ugly, grey sleeping bag that we refered to as "The elephant c**k".

And every few weeks we get a hit on that page from someone who searched for... just that.

[Acid Paul]

LOL. I guess those guys found what they were looking for It's really funny cause this is a pretty competitive keyword.

BTW I'm just thinking what's the heck in letting Inktomi spider the forum. Where do they distribute their results nowadays?

I only know of Looksmart and some of their partner sites, but Inktomi results get burried below regular (usually paid) Looksmart listings. MSN seems to use something different from Inktomi - in fact they keep on calling their search provider "Direct hit" There're also rumors about Yahoo going back to Inktomi, but I guess it's nuts, Google results are much better.

[connext]

Refert to :MOD Title: enhance-google-indexing

in my sessions.php my code is

Code: Select all

global $SID;

	if ( !empty($SID) && !preg_match('#sid=#', $url) )

instead of

Code: Select all

   global $SID; 

   if ( !empty($SID) && !eregi('sid=', $url) ) 

I dont know should I change it to

Code: Select all

global $SID, $HTTP_SERVER_VARS; 

   if ( !empty($SID) && !eregi('sid=', $url) && !strstr($HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ,'Googlebot') && !strstr($HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ,'slurp@inktomi.com;')) 

or not?

[Acid Paul]

Oh man, it's so damn easy to guess if you just mull over it a bit - you have to understand at least basically how the mod works. If you pay attention how the lines change in the modded version you'll see that the first line of code doesn't change except for the last bracket.

The mod was written for the older version of PHPBB when eregi was used to name a function which is now called preg_match. So leave this line as it is - with preg_match and just delete the last bracket.