Out of the box phpBB 3 is awful for SEO

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Frank Rizzo
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Out of the box phpBB 3 is awful for SEO

Post by Frank Rizzo »

As I said in this post:

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... 121&hilit=

phpBB is not great when it comes to being search engine friendly.

That was for 2x but I'm really disappointed to see 3x doing similar things.

Don't believe me? Take a look at Google's cache of this messageboard:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:p ... rt=90&sa=N

Those titles and descriptions are really helpful to potential visitors of the site. NOT :|

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Why the heck hasn't the development of 3 taken this into consideration? Why do I have to spend weeks researching and applying mods?

I'm not asking for keyword URL mods. I'm not asking for any black hat cloaking. All I want is for a messageboard to display proper titles and proper descriptions - out of the box; right at the start.
Last edited by Techie-Micheal on Sun Jun 10, 2007 12:00 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Out of the box phpBB 3 is awful for SEO

Post by Volunteer Forum »

Indeed, you are right...
Last edited by pentapenguin on Sun Jun 10, 2007 5:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Everything that is not perfect is a flaw [",]
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ylcncn
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Re: Out of the box phpBB 3 is awful for SEO

Post by ylcncn »

its still rc. and phpbb have mods for seo devs. you can optimize with them
dont expect everything from team,
Try to solve the problem, make something for yourself and community too,
open source philosophy is this.
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Re: Out of the box phpBB 3 is awful for SEO

Post by Eelke »

ylcncn wrote:its still rc
That's not really an excuse. RC means Release Candidate, meaning that it should in fact be "finished".

Frank Rizzo: you sound "defensive". Have you tried reporting this as a bug, with the comprehensive explanation you've given here?
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Re: Out of the box phpBB 3 is awful for SEO

Post by Frank Rizzo »

How can this be a bug? It is a fundamental issue which I had hoped would have been addressed in v3. If I had known v3 would have been so SE unfriendly I would have switched to another board years ago.

Look. The purpose of a community is to grow. If it doesn't grow it withers away. If a board is to grow it has to attract new visitors and the best way to do that is via search engines.

If board users spend years typing informative posts so that others in world can read it then that's a good thing. But if the board does not feed an SE the right way visitors are not going to come and the board won't grow.

phpBB developers have missed a golden opportunity here. I really can not understand why a simpe title and meta tag facility was not implemented.
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Re: Out of the box phpBB 3 is awful for SEO

Post by Eelke »

Frank Rizzo wrote:How can this be a bug? It is a fundamental issue [...]
Really? Maybe I'm being naive, but I would guess it's a matter of tweaking what goes where in the header of every page.
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Re: Out of the box phpBB 3 is awful for SEO

Post by JohnS0N »

I am really dissapointed on this issue also. As Frank here mentioned it is a fundamental issue. Forum is for communities, without traffic there is no community. But to get traffic we need SEO! For schooled or learned programers this might not be a big deal as they can solve these issues on their own. But for us average joes this is a major pain in the ass as even applying hacks doesn't really work.

So developers please add this into consideration for the gold release.
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Re: Out of the box phpBB 3 is awful for SEO

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Frank Rizzo wrote:How can this be a bug? It is a fundamental issue which I had hoped would have been addressed in v3. If I had known v3 would have been so SE unfriendly I would have switched to another board years ago.

Look. The purpose of a community is to grow. If it doesn't grow it withers away. If a board is to grow it has to attract new visitors and the best way to do that is via search engines.

If board users spend years typing informative posts so that others in world can read it then that's a good thing. But if the board does not feed an SE the right way visitors are not going to come and the board won't grow.

phpBB developers have missed a golden opportunity here. I really can not understand why a simpe title and meta tag facility was not implemented.
could not have said it better then this..
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Re: Out of the box phpBB 3 is awful for SEO

Post by Techie-Micheal »

Hint: Sarcasm doesn't help you get your point across.
Those titles and descriptions are really helpful to potential visitors of the site. NOT :|
I for one am getting tired of people whining about search engine this, search engine that. There is absolutely no way we can cater to every single want. Fact of the matter is, it is extremely easy to fix titles in phpBB2 and 3, if that's what you want to do. And as has been suggested, there's even MODs to do various URL tricks, if that's what you want.
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Re: Out of the box phpBB 3 is awful for SEO

Post by JohnS0N »

If only the title tag has to be changed, than I don't have a problem with it.
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Re: Out of the box phpBB 3 is awful for SEO

Post by Frank Rizzo »

I for one am getting tired of people whining about search engine this, search engine that
Well listen to their concerns and do something about it then.

---

Is there any mechanism here for making an official request for this feature? As I say, it is not a "bug", and it is not just a "can we have fluffy bunnies please" request. IMO this is a fundamental feature which should be fitted as standard.

Do we want to argue about this for the next few weeks trying to score points off each other or can we get a solution?
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Re: Out of the box phpBB 3 is awful for SEO

Post by Rotsblok »

Frank Rizzo wrote:
I for one am getting tired of people whining about search engine this, search engine that
Well listen to their concerns and do something about it then.

---

Is there any mechanism here for making an official request for this feature? As I say, it is not a "bug", and it is not just a "can we have fluffy bunnies please" request. IMO this is a fundamental feature which should be fitted as standard.

Do we want to argue about this for the next few weeks trying to score points off each other or can we get a solution?

TBH dev team think this is the best solutiion. As stated before there are mods that do things you want for you. Why continuing ranting about it then????

Like ylcncn have said
ylcncn wrote:its still rc. and phpbb have mods for seo devs. you can optimize with them
dont expect everything from team,
Try to solve the problem, make something for yourself and community too,
open source philosophy is this.
Dev team wants to put down a good fundament for a BB. Some things they needed to drop otherwise there would never have been a phpBB3.
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Re: Out of the box phpBB 3 is awful for SEO

Post by sunstardude »

Techie-Micheal wrote:Hint: Sarcasm doesn't help you get your point across.
Those titles and descriptions are really helpful to potential visitors of the site. NOT :|
I for one am getting tired of people whining about search engine this, search engine that. There is absolutely no way we can cater to every single want. Fact of the matter is, it is extremely easy to fix titles in phpBB2 and 3, if that's what you want to do. And as has been suggested, there's even MODs to do various URL tricks, if that's what you want.
Wow - it's this kind of support and treatment we get from this board's moderators and the phpbb dev team that make me want to fork over a few bucks to a commercial forum package. I for one am getting tired of getting yelled at by the mods/devs on this board, getting my topics locked, etc. It makes me really hesitate about "creating communities" based on phpBB. Sounds better all the time to spend the $$ on vBulletin, etc just to get some polite support along with it.
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Re: Out of the box phpBB 3 is awful for SEO

Post by Techie-Micheal »

Nobody is yelling at anybody, relax.

Frank Rizzo took my post the way it was meant, there's no reason for you to get upset.

Frank Rizzo: There's a feature request section, yes. Check http://www.sf.net/projects/phpbb.
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Re: Out of the box phpBB 3 is awful for SEO

Post by dcz »

Don't be so rude, after all, phpBB3 is a lot more bot friendly than phpBB2 was, this is for sure.

Better html, better SID handling, many things allowing better indexing and ranking.

Besides SEO is not only a matter of recipe, but a lot more a matter of using the good one for you, some SEO tweaks, even talking about page titles, could be good for one and not so good for another one. There is no universal SEO method, even though some principle almost always apply.

Only talking about the html code, there is just no possible comparison between the two versions, phpBB2 was so heavy where phpBB3 is so light, putting a lot more weight on the post text.

And, a forum is not a CMS, not necessarily all forum needs SEO, it really depends.

Now this being said, of course SEO is important, and believe me, we are working on it.
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