Re: link rel="canonical"

[whaturmuva]

A suggestion for a simple enhancement to improve crawler/bot friendliness, based on:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. ... nical.html

Add just after the <title>...</title> in styles/prosilver/template/overall_header.html:

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<!-- IF U_CANONICAL --><link rel="canonical" href="{U_CANONICAL}" /><!-- ENDIF -->

Add to assign_vars() in index.php:

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'U_CANONICAL' => "{$phpbb_root_path}index.$phpEx",

Add to assign_vars() in viewforum.php:

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'U_CANONICAL' => "{$phpbb_root_path}viewforum.$phpEx?f=$forum_id" . (($start) ? "&start=$start" : ''),

Add to assign_vars() in viewtopic.php:

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'U_CANONICAL' => "{$phpbb_root_path}viewtopic.$phpEx?" . (($topic_data['topic_type'] == POST_GLOBAL) ? '' : "f=$forum_id&") . "t=$topic_id" . (($start) ? "&start=$start" : ''),

I'd also suggest changing the construction of U_VIEW_FORUM and U_VIEW_TOPIC to similarly only include non-zero start parameters, i.e.:

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(($start) ? "&start=$start" : ''))

This should help to eliminate duplicates in search results, improve bot efficiency, and generally have no downsides that I can see. It should have zero impact on board users.

Edit 29 Oct: Updated viewtopic URL to exclude forum_id for globals.

I'm sorry for the blurb here, it comes from area51.phpbb but I received no response as it's not for support purposes. But I had a question regarding this code.

I currently have google indexing my site in two ways. Using my host url: mysite.hosturl.com, and my url: mysite.com

I was wondering if the {$phpbb_root_path} part of this code, could be set as mysite.com. So that when the bots are indexing it as mysite.hosturl.com, the meta tag would encourage it to come in on mysite.com instead of using the hosts domain.

I've been looking for something to do this for awhile (as due to server limitations I can't do a proper 301 redirect)... and this might just be perfect.

So for instance, would it be ok to instead of using

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'U_CANONICAL' => "{$phpbb_root_path}index.$phpEx",

could I instead put the code in as

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'U_CANONICAL' => "http://mysite.com/index.$phpEx",

?

Thanks for the help

[Ather]

Check out this mod, might help
http://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/canonical_url

[whaturmuva]

Thanks Ather for taking the time to respond, but that does not answer my question. To put it simply, instead of using "{$phpbb_root_path}", could I instead use the direct link to my site as described in the quoted portion below.

So for instance, would it be ok to instead of using

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'U_CANONICAL' => "{$phpbb_root_path}index.$phpEx",

could I instead put the code in as

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'U_CANONICAL' => "http://mysite.com/index.$phpEx",

[whaturmuva]

Sorry for the bump, but does anyone know the answer to my question?

[Oleg]

Have you tried doing it to see what would happen?

[whaturmuva]

Have you tried doing it to see what would happen?

No, but only because I do not want to ruin my already good google SERP.

I was hoping someone could tell me if I could insert the actual link of the site instead of the {$phpbb_root_path}

[soumik]

Yes, you can do that without any problems.