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W3C and SEO

Guest foppolo

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Xenboy Explorer

Xenboy

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Not that SEO forum modules hurt anything, but these days they don't seem to help all that much either (forums at least).

I just make sure I have a regularly updated sitemap and where needed a robots.txt file and my items come up in Google quite well _without_ embedding 4,000 "keywords" in every page and using uber-short URLs.

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Darksbane Newbie

Darksbane

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But when everyone has SEO options, it will even back out.



I'm very much against SEO. Let's the search engines figure out what content is most relevant. I don't want to be tricked into visiting a site to give it more ad revenue.


SEO doesn't 'trick' anyone or anything, all it does is make it easier for your pages to get spidered and listed.


Google and friends spider our forums here practically 24/7 without any issues. I have often searched for something I know is here and it comes right up.



Yea, but this isn't a small or startup site. SEO helps the new site to get listed in many search engines.

It is just stubborn to imply that it isn't useful and that it wouldn't make a good addition to IPB.
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Guest

Guest

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Yea, but this isn't a small or startup site. SEO helps the new site to get listed in many search engines.



It is just stubborn to imply that it isn't useful and that it wouldn't make a good addition to IPB.



Our site is small, it's a startup and it uses IPB. Google hasn't left the site since it found us ( about 3 days after we put the forum up, actually ). We're getting better indexing on IPB than we're getting on the site itself, which uses the "SEO" style URL's.

The effect of friendly URL's is more as aesthetic addon for the users than anything these days. The only way it seems to help with search ranking is when the actual keyword being searched for is in the URL. Even then, the difference is minimal.
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Mat Barrie Experienced

Mat Barrie

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SEO doesn't 'trick' anyone or anything, all it does is make it easier for your pages to get spidered and listed.



Tim is correct, Optimising your site DOES trick users into going to it in a lot of cases. Since doing that means that you don't trust your content to improve your ranking. Often sites which practice "SEO" get higher in results than relevant sites with awesome content.
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foppolo Newbie

foppolo

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Google and friends spider our forums here practically 24/7 without any issues. I have often searched for something I know is here and it comes right up.



sure?.... PR for your board shuold help you, but mybe you can contact IPB clients with SEO mods install asking them what kind of benefit they had.

Just to suggest to have an option "SEO-url" during installation or upgrade.
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Darksbane Newbie

Darksbane

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Tim is correct, Optimising your site DOES trick users into going to it in a lot of cases. Since doing that means that you don't trust your

content

to improve your ranking. Often sites which practice "SEO" get higher in results than relevant sites with awesome content.



Ridiculous , that is like saying that you don't want to use a seatbelt because you trust your airbag to save you in a car crash, BOTH are needed and useful. SEO is needed and useful and doesn't 'trick' anyone. If a lackluster site gets better rankings than a site with alot of content it is because that site is playing the search engine game, perhaps with SEO, keyword stuffing, false linkbacks, etc. That does not make SEO bad or the problem, the site with the content did something (like add SEO pages) instead of crying in their milk about bad search engine rankings then they would easily out rank the useless page.
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toykilla Rookie

toykilla

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SEO does matter. Recently a major news item was released relating to a topic on my site. I quickly developed a huge page of information, pictures, etc.. Plenty of content to keep a spider bot happy. I was ranked #1 for a few weeks, then all of the sudden a new page overtook me. It had only 10% of the content that I had but they had purchased a domain specifically for this topic. Due to their network of 'spam' sites they are overtaking my site with ease, even though they lack content.

I find that IPB is very poor at SEO. Search any of the SEO forums and most members will recommend switching to vB if SEO is important to you. I dont know what the difference is, but I see it when comparing my site to my competitors.

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Mat Barrie Experienced

Mat Barrie

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Ridiculous , that is like saying that you don't want to use a seatbelt because you trust your airbag to save you in a car crash, BOTH are needed and useful. SEO is needed and useful and doesn't 'trick' anyone. If a lackluster site gets better rankings than a site with alot of content it is because that

site

is playing the search engine game, perhaps with SEO, keyword stuffing, false linkbacks, etc. That does not make SEO bad or the problem, the site with the

content

did something (like add SEO pages) instead of crying in their milk about bad search engine rankings then they would easily out rank the useless page.



Then you're quite aware that Search Engine Optimisation is one of those things that gets a bad name because of cybersquatters with their PPC sites and immoral site owners with zero content. Search engines need to stop counting anything but content when rating sites.
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Tim Dorr Rookie

Tim Dorr

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SEO does matter. Recently a major news item was released relating to a topic on my site. I quickly developed a huge page of information, pictures, etc.. Plenty of content to keep a spider bot happy. I was ranked #1 for a few weeks, then all of the sudden a new page overtook me. It had only 10% of the content that I had but they had purchased a domain specifically for this topic. Due to their network of 'spam' sites they are overtaking my site with ease, even though they lack content.



Well, there's nothing the content of your site could have done to prevent that. They had more incoming links and that's what builds up Google rankings.

Also, my company forums come up quite a lot in all kinds of Google searches. It doesn't matter that we're not neccessarily SEO optimized, it just matters that we've got relevant content. Search engine spiders know how to read forums. They have to, since there are so many out there. So, trying to optimize for them is a waste considering they know how to handle them already.
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Tim Dorr Rookie

Tim Dorr

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SEO does matter. Recently a major news item was released relating to a topic on my site. I quickly developed a huge page of information, pictures, etc.. Plenty of content to keep a spider bot happy. I was ranked #1 for a few weeks, then all of the sudden a new page overtook me. It had only 10% of the content that I had but they had purchased a domain specifically for this topic. Due to their network of 'spam' sites they are overtaking my site with ease, even though they lack content.



Well, there's nothing the content of your site could have done to prevent that. They had more incoming links and that's what builds up Google rankings.

Also, my company forums come up quite a lot in all kinds of Google searches. It doesn't matter that we're not neccessarily SEO optimized, it just matters that we've got relevant content. Search engine spiders know how to read forums. They have to, since there are so many out there. So, trying to optimize for them is a waste considering they know how to handle them already.
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script Newbie

script

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I disagree, you can find tons of pages on the web on this item

Search engine spiders don't know how to read forums properly when those forums haven't been designed with consideration to spiders. IPB has had various features added since its conception that make it easier for search engine spiders to index it; lo-fi version, abbreviated URLs like ?showtopic= (they used to be ?act=SF&f=1234&t=1234). As for .html vs. .php, search engines may have cared at some point in the past, but they certainly don't now.

In fact, what would really increase your search engine ranking would involve lengthening the URL to something that contains the topic title, i.e. ?whatever=w3c-and-seo.

What search engines really care about is that 1 URL = 1 page of content. The problems that forums have historically had with SEO is the Session ID in URLs, which is different every time the spider spiders the site, causing duplicate content problems. Duplicate content is something search engines hate.
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Mark Grand Master

Mark

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A quick and easy way that might make your forum a little more SEOed is to change:

/index.php?

to:
/?

You can do this in 2.2 by editting the file index.php - do a search for base_url.

There will of course be SEO mods for 2.2, I plan on releaseing FURL for 2.2

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Uwe Apprentice

Uwe

Posted
Posted

I just try to validate beta 2 with

http://validator.w3.org/

and it's no more conformance to W3C :angry:


W3C-conformity isn't important. Try any rank#1-page with any keyword and check its validation. You will see almost all of them are not W3C-conform. G**gle itself isn't W3C-conform (hasn't even a doctype decalaration!).

Much more I would like to see something similar like the css-cache for all this embedded javascript ;)
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Mat Barrie Experienced

Mat Barrie

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I just try to validate beta 2 with

http://validator.w3.org/

and it's no more conformance to W3C :angry:



They've already said this, it will be sorted in RC stages. During the Beta phase, the skin is kinda like road tar. It doesn't change much, but it does. And these changes will break conformance, until they fix it which they said they aren't doing until RC.
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  • 4 weeks later...
Volvospeed Apprentice

Volvospeed

Posted
Posted

A quick and easy way that

might

make your forum a little more SEOed is to change:



/index.php?



to:


/?



You can do this in 2.2 by editting the file index.php - do a search for base_url.



There will of course be SEO mods for 2.2, I plan on releaseing FURL for 2.2



Any timeline for this? I think most of the 2.2 arch is nailed down at this point
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  • 1 month later...
.Sephiroth. Newbie

.Sephiroth.

Posted
Posted

I can use MOD_REWRITE on my local install of Apache 2 on Windows XP. I don't see where everyone else is saying you can't use it on Windows, because I most certainly can.

Mod_rewrite is an APACHE MODULE, so only APACHE Web servers can run it.

<_< >_> As far as SEO, I don't see why people care about it, for my IPB has Google on it every day. (Though, I notice the other search engine bots don't stick around like Google does)

As far as validivity goes, there's some issues with the page jump menus, for the page jump seems to rely on the id, and there's two of the same id on many pages. Also, why can't IPS freakin' encode those damn ampersands in the automodule urls?

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://f...p;#entry1450690 <- So far, 27 errors. What the fudge, IPS?

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Cybertimber2009 Enthusiast

Cybertimber2009

Posted
Posted

The errors are mostly caused by peoples signatures and the like. A clean board install validates. Its been stated, proven, etc.
However, the Bug Tracker code seems to mess up a few items but lets try the Viewabilty test...

Yep, forum loads without any noticable glitches. Its perfect! And its the best test and the fastest code. 1 nanosecond check time.

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