I love everything that IP.B does for SEO but we need a canonical tag on the index page. Right now going to example.com/forum and example.com/forum/index.php returns the same page. For people who have switched to IP.B from other software this could be a problem because by default IP.B uses the "/forum" URL but our previews preferred URL might have included the index. This means we won't have all our link juice going to one page and Google could even flag us for duplicate content (other pages like example.com/forum/blablabla also show the index). I would prefer a 301 redirect to the index page, but if not it shouldn't be too hard to put a canonical tag in the homepage's header with the next release.

Um...we already do output a canonical tag on the forum index page... :unsure: I just confirmed here.

I love everything that IP.B does for SEO but we need a canonical tag on the index page. Right now going to example.com/forum and example.com/forum/index.php returns the same page. For people who have switched to IP.B from other software this could be a problem because by default IP.B uses the "/forum" URL but our previews preferred URL might have included the index. This means we won't have all our link juice going to one page and Google could even flag us for duplicate content (other pages like example.com/forum/blablabla also show the index). I would prefer a 301 redirect to the index page, but if not it shouldn't be too hard to put a canonical tag in the homepage's header with the next release.

What version of IP.Board are you using?

I'm using 3.1.2 and I don't know what I was thinking when I posted this. I just checked my own board and I do see the canonical tag. :whistle: Oops.

Well maybe we could still have an option to redirect everyone to the homepage. It would be a nice feature for a future release.

Correct me if i am wrong, but we need more cannonical options. For exemple google webmaster tool often find duplicate content or title or description on cuch kind of url :

On forums

/index.php?showforum=65&prune_day=100&sort_by=Z-A&sort_key=last_post&topicfilter=all&st=30

/index.php?showforum=65&st=30

Infact it's just the topic filter but google think it's different pages. On blogs (dc title)

index.php?app=blog&module=display&section=blog&blogid=30&m=7&y=2010

/index.php?app=blog&module=display&section=blog&blogid=30&m=9&y=2010

On annouces wich are duplicated on each forums

/index.php?showannouncement=20&f=121

/index.php?showannouncement=20&f=122

Correct me if i am wrong, but we need more cannonical options. For exemple google webmaster tool often find duplicate content or title or description on cuch kind of url :

On forums

/index.php?showforum=65&st=30

/index.php?showforum=65&prune_day=100&sort_by=Z-A&sort_key=last_post&topicfilter=all&st=30

Infact it's just the topic filter but google think it's different pages. On blogs (dc title)

/index.php?app=blog&module=display&section=blog&blogid=30&m=9&y=2010

index.php?app=blog&module=display&section=blog&blogid=30&m=7&y=2010

On annouces wich are duplicated on each forums

/index.php?showannouncement=20&f=122

/index.php?showannouncement=20&f=121

I don't agree with your suggestion that Google interprets two pages with different query strings as separate pages. Google has been around for a long time, and they are fully aware of how query strings work. Yes, they can lead to different output, so to that end Google figures out what output will show on a given page given different query string parameters - but it knows it's the same "page" just with different ordering/filtering options.

Your right. But here is a concret exemple i have :

On my board i got an annoucement page which is popular.
As we know, that announcment can be see from different urls (according to the forums section we want it to be displayed):

/index.php?showannouncement=46&f=101

/index.php?showannouncement=20&f=121

/index.php?showannouncement=20&f=122

While we search some keyword in order to get that annoucement page on google only 1 url will be displayed, the 2 other will be ignored as they are considered as duplicate.

That lead to issue if we want one annoucement page to gain popularity and pagerank :
issue 1 : if i publish external or internal link targeting that annoucement page, i have to carefully link it to the page that google chosed as the not-duplicted one othewise the backlink would have no benefits for gaining serp positions.
issue 2 : visitor or forum member who want's to link that page will link to one of the different/same annoucement pages. If the annoucement is available from 10 urls. We have only 10% chance to benefit a good backlink.

I think we lose a great linkjuice potential on annoucement pages because of this.