Download :

Google Yahoo MSN Sitemaps & RSS V2.0.1

viewforum.php & viewtopic.php

Find: page_header
Edit the line so it looks like: page_header($topic_data[’topic_title’]);

overall_header.php

Edit the content of the title tags so it looks like: {PAGE_TITLE} @ {SITENAME}

If you want to change the PAGE_TITLE of the index page, you can either edit page_header in index.php or the INDEX string in the language packs.

On the other hand, you may discover that once your forum has finally been added to Google it has not been correctly indexed.

A very simple test is to browse over 4-5 forum pages from different posting dates, to select a few words phrase and run a Google search by enclosing your search phrase within quotes.

“this is the text extracted from my forum page that I want to search on Google”
This is a phpBB Search Engines Optimization sample searching phrase

To make it clearer about what this job entails, let us just mention a few of the technical parameters that are not search engines friendly:

1. URLs containing parameters

There are two issues here:

In one hand these urls containing parameters look like “viewforum.php?id=1″ and as you will soon observe the PHP programming language is being revealed. Revealing your programming language is a major security weakness that hackers may exploit.

On the other hand it is well known that Google poorly indexes URLs containing parameters.

PRO IT Service solution is to transform your forum pages URLs from:

yourwebside.com/forum/viewforum.php?id=1

into:

yourwebside.com/forum/forum-1.html

Please notice that the parameter “id=1″ is now part of “forum-1″ and that the file extension changes from .php to .html.

This solution is 100% search engines friendly and also works for those forum installation that already have their pages indexed in Google.

Your preview URLs will remain valid and conduct your visitors to the right place.

Google will progressively update its preview URLs reference to the new URLs and once this process is completed rapidly and correctly index all your forum pages.

2. linked items importance and redundancy

Certain forum posts elements are linked by default (author, icon etc.).

The problem is that the components’ linking is not configured based on search engines friendliness principles.

Redundant links also confuse Google and other search engines as they attempt to index your forum driven pages.

3. forum pages titles

By default all your forum pages will have a common page title which is the name you declare when installing the forum.

Google and the other major search engines index pages much better if their titles reflect the forum pages content and therefore are unique from one forum page to another.

The page title should be based on the forum, thread or post name depending on which forum driven type of page we are referring to.

Two seem well-known:

• Free – phpbb SEO
• Paid – Magic-SEO-Url

They both seem good and the team from phpbb SEO makes a compelling case for their mod. I generally don’t mind paying for a mod if it makes my life easier however my big issue with these mods is keeping up with changes to phpbb. If history is any indication, you may need to make adjustments along the way.

There may be an easier way from Tech Tibits (check out the site for details):

An alternative, albeit easy way to prevent duplicate indexing is to add these lines to your robots.txt :

User-agent: *
Disallow: /viewtopic.php?p=
Disallow: /viewtopic.php?=&p=
Disallow: /viewtopic.php?t=
Disallow: /viewtopic.php?start=
Disallow: /*&view=previous
Disallow: /*&view=next
Disallow: /*&sid=
Disallow: /*&p=
Disallow: /*&sd=a

Very clever. I’ll try it out on one of my forums and see how it works out.