How to get forum title in url in phpbb? - phpbb

I am trying to have forum title in the url so for eg, my forum title "grass is green" shows ups in the url as www.myforum/forum/grass-is-green.php and not www.myforum/forum/viewforum.php?f=5
I have tried doing the changes given here http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=1053375 but the changes are not reflected and the url stills appears as before
Please help me out .. thanks in advance

The mod you linked to doesn't affect the URL, it looks up the title and changes a link's text in a post. What you are looking for is a SEO mod that rewrites / redirects URLs. A quick look through the phpBB site and I see a couple, but they seem to have issues. These types of mods can also break if a topic gets renamed. The original "...&t=250" link would work, but the ".../old_topic_name/" would break.
To quote one of the phpBB Support team members: "We do not recommend any SEO mods. There is no real reason to mess with the URLs like that. The search engines index them fine as-is."
Hope that helps!

Related

Reposting duplicate content on websites

A contact of ours would like to repost our blog content on their website but I’ve always been told not to do this as it would be seen as duplicate content by google and hurt our SEO and drive traffic away. Is this correct?
It is indeed bad practice. Google is good at picking up who posted the article first and who has the duplicate content. If your contact is ok with it they can add a canonical tag pointing to the page that they took the content from that will make clear to google that they do not want rankings from doing so and that the original content is at your page.
Regards

Use of canonical tag in HTML

I read about canonical tags in HTML and from what I understood it is used to help search engines to realize which is the original content. I have articles in my recently created blog, which I have pasted in certain other popular websites. In those websites I gave back a link to my original blog post with the canonical tag. But yet my blog page is not visible in search engines (other websites do show my article). Before I had pasted onto other websites, my articles were indexed on google and could be seen on the 1st page. So I guess, there is no problem on my SEO part.
Can someone please suggest a method where my original blog gets higher preference for the content?
You can use cross domain canonical tags.
So if you have duplicated content on other domains you can use the canonical tag on those pages pointing back to the original page on your site.
This a great way to deal with syndicated content; of course you would need code level access on these other websites so you can implement the canonical tag.
More info below
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
Don't just copy paste your articles on every place on the internet, that will not do you any good. After writing a good article go to other sites and write something else about your articles like what your article is about, how it is helpful to someone, something like that so that people and websites come to your website to read your article. For this you don't need "canonical"
If you copy paste articles to other websites, it will only create duplicate content issues and will only harm your SEO efforts.
No, it is not required for your Blog section to do canonical issue.
Canonical means Google displays same pages with different URL.
The first thing is not submitting your article in different websites I will not give you any benefit in your ranking. If you write a good and quality content you should post in only one website if you post in different sited google will consider as a duplicate content. So it's better for you you can share your approved blog link in social media sites and also do social bookmarking, microblogging. And after you don't need canonical tag.
As #moobot said you can indeed use a cross-domain canonical tag to let Google know about the original source of the content. How exactly are you adding the canonical on other domains?
The canonical link should be in the head section of the html code. If you're adding it yourself somewhere in the body tag that's not going to do you any good.
Check out this article for some other common mistakes with the canonical tag
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html
#metadice mentioned that copying your content all over the web isn't good for your SEO and i agree completely. If you do this for some extra backlinks or something i would recommend you to stop doing this.
Hope my answer will help someone who has this same question.

How to deal with missing items the SEO way?

I am working on a public-facing web site which serves up articles for people to read. After some time, articles become stale and we remove them from the site. My question is this: what is the best way to handle the situation when a search engine visits a URL corresponding to a removed article? Should the app respond with a permanent redirect (301 Moved Permanently) to a "article not found" page, or is there a better way to handle this?
Edit
These articles are actually not removed, but they are "unpublished" - and they may return to the "published" state eventually.
If the article is remove you should respond with 410 Gone. Your error page can still have some useful info on it as long as the response code is correct. This indicates that the page has been intentionally removed and is not just "not found" (as would happen with a bad url).
You might consider keeping the content up, with some sort of indicator to the person reading it that the content is stale. Then you could also include more relevant content on the page or links to more relevant content.
This might not be appropriate for your situation, or could be more work than its worth, but it may be a good way not to waste potential traffic.
I feel like the 410 Gone response would be the appropriate response, however, you'd basically be telling the search engine "we don't have this content anymore, so stop linking here" - which isn't advantageous to your SEO strategy.
Well, if you want to be all proper about it, it should redirect not to an article not found, but to an "article removed" page. Because article not found suggests that it should be a 404.
My gut tells me that you should probably have an article removed page, but in practice many sites will simply do a 301 redirect to the home page.
I think the idea there is that any "link juice" from the old article will then be transferred to the home page rather than a generic "article removed" page. I get the feeling though that search engines might not look too kindly on that practice.

Search Engine Optomisation

My neighbour popped over last night to ask me for help with regards to his company's website. He said that it used to be ranked pretty high on Google but has since fallen off completely.
Now, I'm a Windows App programmer hence my request for help. I took a look and there the meta tags seem ok. I recommended that he add a <h1>heading</h1> to the pages with a page title to help reinforce the content.
I also suggested that finding related websites and getting them to link to his site was good for search ranking.
Are there any other general strategies / tools that could help?
He site is: http://www.colofinder.co.uk/
ps. BTW: this isn't just an attempt to have StackOverflow link to my neighbour's site - I'm aware that links from SO don't add to its ranking.
Go to http://ooyes.net/blog/a-step-by-step-15-minute-seo-audit-%28a-sample-from-seo-secrets%29 and read it. Then go to http://www.searchenginejournal.com/55-quick-seo-tips-even-your-mother-would-love/6760/ and read it. Then go to your friends site and look at it with that information in mind. Off the top of my head, I would add flip the company name and page title in the "title" tags. Look at the google analytics account and see how people are coming to the site. That will give you an idea of where you should start your efforts to build a workable base.
First of all he needs to be make sure that his website contents are well managed and to the point. Then Page title has to be pin point, meta tags are obsolete so try meta description. Then Main Heading should be under h1 tag, sub heading under h2 and further sub heading h3. Try to update your website one in a month.
Use community websites like Facebook, Twitter and linkidin and other related forums for posting updates about completed projects and must give inbound links. You can use your company name as an inlink to your primary website and project name as an inlink of subpage of your company website.
Keep on posting at least once in a week. Post website URL to online directories will be a great help. Do not use Blackhat SEO techniques like cloaking. Do not use any invisible text/div in your website. Make sure that whenever you give your website link any where, give the most to the point and appropriate link.
Your link should have to have that stuff against you are posting your link/sublink. Make a section on your website for tag clouds/google tags, this will be a great attraction for search engines and they will link your website to other popular websites.
Make sure these tags should be directed to top ranking website which should have relevant material. I hope this will help. Feel free if you have trouble to understand anything i have mentioned above. Best of Luck

SEO Optimization Error, improper crawling or improper indexing

i have a blog build in wordpress, And my domain name is like example.com (i can't give you the original name, because some times the editors will mark this question as SPAM :( , and if any one really want to check directly from my site will add at the end of the question.)
http://example.com and the blog name is http://example.com/articles/
and the sitemap.xml is available in http://example.com/sitemap.xml
Google daily visit my site and all my new articles were crawled, if i search the "articles title + example.com " will get the search result from the google , its my site. but the heading is not the actual one. its getting from another article's data.
(i think can give you a sample search query, please don't take this as a spam)
Installing Go Language in Ubuntu+tutorboy - But this will list with proper title after a long title :(, I think now you understood what i am facing ... please help me to find out why this happens.
Edit:
How can i improve my SEO with wordpress?
When I search that query I don't get the page "Installing Go...", I get the "PHP header types" article, which has the above text on the page (links at the right). So the titles showing in Google are correct.
Google has obviously not crawled that page yet since it's quite new. Give it time, especially if your site is new and/or unpopular.
Couple of things I need to make clear:
Google crawled your site on 24 Nov 2009 12:01:01 GMT, so needless to say Google actually does not visit your site(blog)everyday.
When I queried the phrase you provided, the results are right. There are two url relates to your site. One is home page of your blog, another is the page that is (more closely)related to your query. The reason is the query phrase is directly related to the page of tutorboy.com/articles/php/use-php-functions-in-javascript.html, however, in your home page there are still some related keywords. That is the reason why Google presents two pages on the result page.
Your second question is hard to answer since it needs a complicated answer. Still, the following steps are crucial to your SEO.
Unique and good content. Content is king, and it is the subject that remains consistent in the whole time while another elements are changing with the evolving of search engine technology. Also keep your site content fresh.
Back links. Part of the reason that Google does not visit your site after your updating your site is your site lacks enough back links.
Good structure. Properly use those tags like<t>, <description>,<alt>etc.
Using web analysts tools like Google Analysts. It free, and you can see lot of things that you missed.
Most importantly, grabbing some SEO books or spending couple of minutes everyday to read some SEO articles.
Good Luck,