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.

Author’s Notes :

This mod will add dynamic meta tags build out with the ending page’s content.
It’s simple and efficient, will add specific meta tags to all phpBB pages.
A single SQL query is optionally added in viewtopic.php, to grab the first post’s most used words (common words are excluded).
This allow for a better overall relevancy of meta keywords.
The first post of every topic pages is used to build the meta description.
BBcodes tags are stripped off as well as smileys.

The mod will output index, follow robots tags for all the content found under the best URLs and will add a noindex, follow robots tags for pages such as style preview, print view, sids and highlighted URLs to prevent duplicate indexing.

You should not use more than 20 keywords in the keyword meta tags. As well, you should not use too long description tags.

Documentation :

This tutorial is made for phpBB2, phpBB3 already has a rebuild search tables feature. You can use it the same way as per phpBB2, expect you won’t find any search_stopwords.txt but rather a search_ignore_words.php file in your languages folders. You can add words to exclude there before you start the rebuild search procedure. The three letter limit does not apply anymore as well, the mod will filter them no matter what now.

Download:

phpBB3 SEO Dynamic Meta tags

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.

Among the requirements is the most important module for Apache mod_rewrite. Without module for the rewriting of addresses, should not be used these mod. Virtually all hosting services fee, using Linux, have this form. If you use IIS Windows, you must use isapi_rewrite.

The easiest way is to download and install a version of phpbb3 completely moddata (as amended) ready for use, called phpBB EES Premod V 3.0.

By neglecting this possibility you can choose from three other mod: Advanced phpBB3 EES Rewrite mod, mod Mixed phpBB3 EES Rewrite, Simple phpBB3 EES mod Rewrite.All mod can handle UTF-8 characters, if the string to be translated is “new registrations are open” will be transformed into “novelty-open-the-inscriptions.”

Advanced phpBB3 EES mod Rewrite is the most complete version produced by users of phpbb-seo.

The address of a page will be transformed in the following ways: by viewtopic.php? F = xx & t = yy a topic-title-tyy.html, viewtopic.php? P = xx to postxx.html.So rename the part of (topic) with the title of debate and amend the url of a single intervention (? P = xx), xx naturally means a number.

To make phpBB3 seo friendly, it must amend 13 files in the installation phpBB3 and make 8 more files in the folder of the forum.

Mixed phpBB3 EES mod Rewrite is the version that mixed between simple and advanced. Unlike Advanced phpBB3 EES the url of the topic is rewritten once, while that of the forum (viewforum) every time it is changed.

Simple phpBB3 EES mod Rewrite is the simplest version, with this mod address is rewritten once for all discussions, forums, lists users…

Here’s visit here direct where you can download the various mod: http://downloads.phpbb-seo.com/phpbb3-seo-url-10/

There are also alternatives to the following mod: ticket at a price of 66.15 euros, there is Magic Seo URL that allows you to rewrite the url (www.magic-seo-url.com/phpbb3/)

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.