SEO

[Dua]

Hello all,
I have seen IPB's SEO is poorest SEO i have seen comparing to other Forums especially when compared to vBulletin, IPB is far away.
I think IPB should work a lot on it. Even on google's first page out of 10 are 5-6 vBulletin Forums, & IPB's 1-2 Forums.
Hope to see IPS improves it.

[.Ian]

Are you comparing standard VB forums with standard IPB forums?

Many large VB forums use Vbseo - out of the box IPB is better than VB - however for some bizarre reason you cannot add keywords etc., into IPB - only by editing.

[Ambar]

I have been playing with the SEO stuff for a few years... and finding out all this "stuff" is pretty much "Snake oil" Friendly URL is cool and looks neat.. and all the cool this and that makes ya feel like you are helping yourself, But at the end of the day, Good content, fresh content and lots of it is about the only way to get to the top. When I upgraded to 3.0 I didnt load my current paid seo product ( to buggy and no support ) and actually in 2 to 3 days I was back where I was. My traffic did drop than right back to were it was...

Right now I'm ripping out my seo paid component, will update you.. this is the second time I have and expect to be back where I was on Wed. :)

[Mark]

Dua,
Specifically what do you feel more is needed?

[Martin A.]

IPS have said a few times that they only aimed at implementing the very basic of SEO in IPB3. Since the SEO eggheads can't agree on what's good or bad, they've put that task in hands of people who may know more about it than they do (and they wont get blamed it they've done it "wrong").

[mld11]

I love the IP.Board SEO improvements since it's previous version.

All I had to do was slightly enhance how users and guests could view my board, and the guest count rose by 50, and is constantly over 50. I could never have bought a better product.

Thanks to IPS for great support too, weekends are a bit slow, but they make direct fixes, and it easily takes 1 - 4 replies to fix any given issue, up to Tier II.

[Dhillon]

I have some suggestions :)

• Multiple urls point to the same page ex. "'/' , 'index' , 'index.php?'" all point to the home page.So no link consensus, I'd like that to be 'fixed'.
• Option to add meta description for boards 'homepage'

• Insert '#' in permalinks to prevent search engines from indexing duplicate urls.

Ex. Change

to

[Dua]

YOu can see what other IPB users think of IPB's SEO
http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=67454

Regarding LOOKS IPB ROCKZ. No one can compete IPB.

[Guest]

That topic on TAZ is ridiculous, it's a bunch of armchair "experts" commenting on something they clearly do not understand. Unfortunately, they can't even feign enough knowledge on the subject to a level that makes their posts credible.

To search Google for a specific term, after launching a forum a few weeks prior, and expect to be able to compare the underlying forum software's SEO performance on that basis is ludicrous. It takes far more than "a few weeks" to get decent rankings, but also, the content of the sites is totally different, as will be the number (and quality) of incoming links from elsewhere.

The software isn't the problem here. It's the content, how many links the sites have, where the links are coming from, and the age of the site. IPB's SEO is more than suitable, and significantly better than the competition.

[Dua]

A nice answer from B.Ramburn
http://icelabz.net/forum/why-its-better-t1982-pid-5040.html#entry5040

I think IPS should try to improve a SEO which doesnt need any other Mods like Community & minervaSEO.

[Dua]

One question for IPS Team
I installed MinervaSEO free one, & just removed it some days back.
The Rankings was working f9 till it was installed.
When removed it i was amazed to find my Forum not even in 10 pages yahoo, google.
So why this happened?

[Luke]

I have some suggestions :)

• Multiple urls point to the same page ex. "'/' , 'index' , 'index.php?'" all point to the home page.So no link consensus, I'd like that to be 'fixed'.
• Option to add meta description for boards 'homepage'

• Insert '#' in permalinks to prevent search engines from indexing duplicate urls.

Ex. Change

to

Unfortunately anything after "#" isn't passed back to the web server by the browser as this is reserved for the anchor context. I do agree one of the things that I don't like about IPB's seo is the "../page__view__getnewpost" thing. There is nothing wrong with using the query string syntax mixed in with basic SEO. What I mean is instead of this:

I'd much rather see this:

I know that because of not having mod_rewrite you could do something like this:

http://community.invisionpower.com/index.php?/topic/296787-vbulletin-owners-handy-faqs/

But that really defeats the purpose. And with most web servers you can do this anyway:

http://community.invisionpower.com/index.php/topic/296787-vbulletin-owners-handy-faqs/

Two other things I'd like to see (implemented by default) is removing the trailing slash from links. I also believe that the topic id should go at the end of the title as it is the least important to a search engine.

[Luke]

One question for IPS Team

The Rankings was working f9 till it was installed.

When removed it i was amazed to find my Forum not even in 10 pages yahoo, google.

So why this happened?

Unless you 301 redirect the old links to the new, your new link structure is considered "new" (or rather "duplicate") and the old links are revisited and considered "broken" when the search engine encounters a 404.

It's usually best to use a 301, 307, or 410 when changing link structure on your site (301 = Permanent Redirect, link is moved, 307 = Temporary Redirect, link residing somewhere else temporarily, 410 = Gone, link no longer exists).

IPB 3 does offer to redirect old non-FURL url's to the new ones via 301.

[bfarber]

I took a look at that topic, and I'm afraid I disagree with numerous statements made in the topic personally.

1) SEO isn't going to make you #1 if you don't have the content on your site to warrant you being #1. There are entirely too many people on the internet who want their general chat site to be the first page in Google when you search for this or that, and it's just not going to happen.

2) The available SEO options in IPB beat out just about any other competitor in my opinion. It is an opinion of course, and I'm only referring to stock installations (of course if you start experimenting with specialized SEO software like vbSEO, IPB is not trying to "compete" against such an industry).


If you aren't on the first or second or whatever page of Google for your specific search terms, perhaps Google simply doesn't think your site deserves to be. ;)


Random example: go do a google search for "heathrow motors" and you'll notice a topic on OUR site #1 comes up about a subject completely unrelated to our site, simply because that topic has information that Google thinks searchers are looking for. It's all about your content.

[Guest]

One question for IPS Team

The Rankings was working f9 till it was installed.

When removed it i was amazed to find my Forum not even in 10 pages yahoo, google.

So why this happened?

Because you changed your URL structure entirely, and likely did not do it properly. Moving from one URL format to another is not a decision to be made lightly, and it's impact will have far greater effect than anything IPS could change in the software.

As I said before, the software is fine, it's the content and changes users make that are generally the reason for poor (or good, for that matter) rankings.

[Dua]

I agree with "DAN C" but there is lotz of content on my site. But I dont understand what more it lacks.
Do a topic needs to be Hot Topic or it depends on no of views.
& I wanted to say i want just an improvement in SEO so that we dont need any communitySEO or MinervaSEO

[Guest]

I agree with "DAN C" but there is lotz of content on my site. But I dont understand what more it lacks.

Do a topic needs to be Hot Topic or it depends on no of views.

As I said, if you were ranking previously and now you've changed your URL structure, you're not any more - it's likely that the change you made *is* the cause of the problem. Not the software. Whether a topic is hot, or has a lot of views, is irrelevant.


Finally, as I wrote about in my blog post a few days ago, you already don't need Community SEO or Minerva SEO. They're not necessary. If you feel they are, please, tell me what specific features you think they offer that IP.Board does not.

[Tilted]

I also believe that the topic id should go at the end of the title as it is the least important to a search engine.

least important to humans too. I'll second this notion.