Rod. Posted May 21, 2012 Share Posted May 21, 2012 I've been a customer since 2000, and unfortunately I'm considering moving to another platform. IPB has come a long way and is by far the best looking forum software out there, hovered it's time IPB focuses on making their software search engine friendly. My traffic is serosulsly suffering due to poor optimization. I've been waiting years now for IPB to get seo right, but when is it really going to happen? I'm giving it a few more months to see where things go. Its unfortunate that there are a plethora of negative info out there talking about how bad IPB is with seo. It's time you guys focus your energy on making the forum more search engine friendly. You already have the best and nicest platform, now focus on seo. Hope you guys take my feedback seriously, as I don't want to switch. However, I also need to consider the future of my site. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rimi Posted May 21, 2012 Share Posted May 21, 2012 Hello. I suggest you tell them how specifically to improve SEO. Otherwise, nothing will happen because IPS thinks that they're already doing everything right. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jυra Posted May 21, 2012 Share Posted May 21, 2012 I don't recall IPB ever being search engine unfriendly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Taylor J Posted May 21, 2012 Share Posted May 21, 2012 ^ Specially with all the new updates to deal with SEO in the latest major version. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rod. Posted May 21, 2012 Author Share Posted May 21, 2012 Is this not the feedback forum? Im not a seo expert, however it is well documented that IPB has issues with seo. Don't become defensive, I'm simply providing my feedback. I look forward to hearing from an IPB representative. ^ Specially with all the new updates to deal with SEO in the latest major version. I'm on 3.3.1. We're there improvements with 3.3.2? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rimi Posted May 21, 2012 Share Posted May 21, 2012 I'm not being defensive. I'm suggesting to you that you be specific because I have seen this thread countless times before and the request is to always be specific. In 3.3 Matt made countless changes to IPB to improve SEO. To say that there are well documented facts of poor SEO on a recently released product is hard to believe which is why you must say what exactly is wrong with the SEO. Refusing to do so and then justifying your failure to act by using "I'm not an SEO expert" as an excuse further invalidates your claims and therefore your feedback will be ignored. So it is in your best interest to show what exactly IPS did wrong that is so well documented. :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Taylor J Posted May 21, 2012 Share Posted May 21, 2012 Is this not the feedback forum? Im not a seo expert, however it is well documented that IPB has issues with seo. Don't become defensive, I'm simply providing my feedback. I look forward to hearing from an IPB representative. I'm on 3.3.1. We're there improvements with 3.3.2? 3.3.2 isn't a major version, thats a minor version release, 3.3.0 is a major version release. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rod. Posted May 21, 2012 Author Share Posted May 21, 2012 With all due respect, I upgraded to v3 when it came out. I'll certainly give it time to perform with regards to seo. It's my goal to stay with IPB. Thanks to those who provided constructive feedback (aka therev). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rhett Posted May 21, 2012 Share Posted May 21, 2012 If you have any suggestions of items that need improvement, we are all ears. Basing your opinion on items you read on the internet however isn't always going to provide you with fact's. The Best SEO is good content however and that has been proven time and time again. The development team has listened to feedback on this topic and has made some improvements over the last few versions, however as you can see straight from google the best method for drawing attention to your site is great content.http://community.inv...nk-1-in-google/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Management Matt Posted May 21, 2012 Management Share Posted May 21, 2012 Rod, I've taken a quick look at your site and while this isn't meant to be an in-depth look at 'SEO' for your site, it should help you get started.Enable search friendly URLS! You have the old style showtopic=x format. You're losing valuable keywords in the linking within the forum Title tag: Install IP.SEO and set a title tag for the board index. Right now you have just the domain name. The title tag is incredibly important from an SEO perspective. "Cigar Pass - Cigar Reviews Forum" would be a good start. Certainly better than 'CigarPass.com'. Just fixing those two things should help improve matters greatly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rod. Posted May 21, 2012 Author Share Posted May 21, 2012 Matt, Thanks a lot for the feedback. I will certainly make those changes this week. I actually have IP SEO installed, and had all of the meta data for the forum homepage setup, however cleared it out last night. The one big thing I noticed from Google Webmaster Tools is that I keep receiving warnings for duplicate content. That is most likely the reason I'm not ranking as high as I should. In any case, thanks again for the response. Best, Rod Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Royzee Posted May 21, 2012 Share Posted May 21, 2012 IP.SEO makes the admin feel better. Content makes the search engines feel better. :huh: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rod. Posted May 21, 2012 Author Share Posted May 21, 2012 IP.SEO makes the admin feel better. Content makes the search engines feel better. :huh: No need to keep beating a dead horse. Google penalizes for duplicate content. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Management Matt Posted May 22, 2012 Management Share Posted May 22, 2012 Well. That's not strictly true. Google won't penalise you for having one or more links to the same page. Each page has a canonical tag so Google can easily locate the 'correct' page URL. Indeed, that is exactly why Google added the canonical tag. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nils Posted May 22, 2012 Share Posted May 22, 2012 At the moment I am receiving a lot of warnings from Google about duplicate titles. I don't think Google actually penalizes this much, but it might be helpful to add page numbers to topic titles and forums to minimize the problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bfarber Posted May 22, 2012 Share Posted May 22, 2012 but it might be helpful to add page numbers to topic titles and forums to minimize the problem. Page numbers (for pages beyond #1) are already added to the title tags in topics and forums Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nils Posted May 22, 2012 Share Posted May 22, 2012 Look at that... I guess Google just hasn't re-indexed all my threads yet since the update. Sorry! :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ElectricPrismX Posted July 28, 2012 Share Posted July 28, 2012 Its ridiculous that IP.Board doesn't use a topics tags as individual keywords. In the current version the keywords is a run on sentence clipped from the first few sentences of the first post - absolutely rediculous. I've suffered in Google and SEO because of Invisions poor SEO design. I'm at the point where I go into the Smarty PHP Templates and fix it myself or jump ship to Vanilla Forums or somewhere else - ridiculous. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
4joys Posted July 28, 2012 Share Posted July 28, 2012 I may be in the minority here, but when I moved my website over from other software I suffered the normal loss of traffic associated with switching software. It took a little while, but after making all my appropriate SEO changes and sticking with IPB, my search traffic is now higher than it was before with more members registering and posting. I'm pleased with my organic search results with IPB. You can't just use the default IPB settings, you should take the initiative and time to change/customize settings like Matt mentioned above. That goes with any software. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ajouz ♞ Posted July 28, 2012 Share Posted July 28, 2012 I really do not believe in SEO at all ,it is the big lie !. what you need is : good content + writer for your site + good skinner to code a modern skin for your site + remove unnecessary hooks to make your site faster + good moderators + good marketing Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bfarber Posted July 30, 2012 Share Posted July 30, 2012 Its ridiculous that IP.Board doesn't use a topics tags as individual keywords. In the current version the keywords is a run on sentence clipped from the first few sentences of the first post - absolutely rediculous. I've suffered in Google and SEO because of Invisions poor SEO design. I'm at the point where I go into the Smarty PHP Templates and fix it myself or jump ship to Vanilla Forums or somewhere else - ridiculous. If you believe that your site is suffering due to the meta keywords or descriptions on your site, I think you should read up on "SEO" a bit more because you are almost certainly mistaken. Meta tags are all but ignored entirely by search engines for purposes of ranking a site. The description may (or may not) be used in the listing that a user sees when searching Google, but Google does not use it to rank your site, because it is so easy for spammers to manipulate. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Makoto Posted July 31, 2012 Share Posted July 31, 2012 Pretty much seconding what bfarber said, keyword meta tags are very unlikely to to ever make a significant impact on your sites search engine ranking. The description tag can, however, be useful. My site's meta description is what is displayed on Google. While it may not help or hurt your ranking, a good description can obviously make a big difference in how many of your impressions turn into clicks. I still use keywords for the sake of using them, as do many, but even if I removed the keyword meta tag completely I doubt it'd make any noticeable difference. Over half my sites traffic comes from Google and other search engines. I consider it well optimized, though I'd love to see IP.SEO's Acronym's bug fixed, as I strongly believe my community could make good use of this feature. Simply put, I think IP.Board is doing relatively well as far as SEO goes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CSSlife Posted September 12, 2012 Share Posted September 12, 2012 well I had a relatively popular PS Vita forum, installed IPB SEO etc... and I was noewhere on the rankings and traffic was dwindling every day. I took the decision to move to other software and surprise surprise, my rankings went up immediately as did traffic and it's been steady since. You guys need to take a good hard look at other software to find out what they are doing that's right, because there's clearly an underlying problem with IPB that noeone wants to admit to. The fact you have customers creating threads about it is proof enough, it's one of the most common complaints about IPB. I would come back in a second if I knew it was as good as any of the other software out there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3DKiwi Posted September 13, 2012 Share Posted September 13, 2012 well I had a relatively popular PS Vita forum, installed IPB SEO etc... and I was noewhere on the rankings and traffic was dwindling every day. I took the decision to move to other software and surprise surprise, my rankings went up immediately as did traffic and it's been steady since. You guys need to take a good hard look at other software to find out what they are doing that's right, because there's clearly an underlying problem with IPB that noeone wants to admit to. The fact you have customers creating threads about it is proof enough, it's one of the most common complaints about IPB. I would come back in a second if I knew it was as good as any of the other software out there. So why then do I have high rankings? I'm only beaten by the company that makes the software program my site supports and Wikipedia. 3DKiwi Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Makoto Posted September 13, 2012 Share Posted September 13, 2012 You guys need to take a good hard look at other software to find out what they are doing that's right, because there's clearly an underlying problem with IPB that noeone wants to admit to. You're right, the image posted right above you is clearly photoshopped and I don't get thousands of visitors from Google every day. IPS is responsible for ensuring your site has quality content and that you know how to properly optimize your own board. I'd place a bet that this is a PEBKAC issue, and not an issue with IP.Board. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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