Search Engines Optimize

[I, Brian]

Actually - the meta tags are very easily inserted into your actual forum template. Simply replace the meta tags used as default by the yabbse install with general ones for your site and the meta-tags will appear on every thread.

However, it is an important point to note that Google's bots care nothing for meta-tags. The trouble is, they are too easily abused and this is a lesson learned by spider developers.

[hedging]

: ))) Are you seriuos think that I dont know this? As to you - lets remove template modify from admin center - you can edit it in notepad, lets remove all settings - you can edit them in mysql, and so on....

[I, Brian]

Why are you asking about using meta-tags from the admin panel then, if meta-tags are a) so easily changed anyway, and b) mostly irrelevant now anyway?? Did I misunderstand you original point? Apologies - I am not sure what you are asking about regarding meta-tags.

[Daniel Hofverberg]

Pretty much the only meta tag in decent use by search engines these days is Description. I believe Inktomi is the only search engine that still uses Keyword and other meta tags.

[hedging]

Search Engines use keywords but they check them. For example they get keyword and look at text on the page, if there is the work from keywords - this is big plus for Search rating. (excuse my English).

[I, Brian]

hedging

Individual keywords for individual pages may be a majopr headache. I can see use general key words for the entire site as working but...for individual pages?? Is that what you're asking?

[I, Brian]

I am still trying to use hprod's example to create static .html pages but I am really struggling here.

I've managed to get the indivual boards showing as static .htm - the reason I couldn't get that to work before is because I used the .htaccess file in my forum folder, rather than public_html folder.

But I just *cannot* work out what I need to do to get the actual threads showing as static .htm.

I thought maybe I should replace: ";action=display;threadid=" in boardindex.php with "_" but that's had no effect by itself.

Is there something else to be added to hprod's original .htaccess code?

Or is it just a simple bit of code in boardindex.php itself I need to change?

Yes - I did PM hprod but he's not answered.


anyone

Could anyone please help me out here work out how to create static HTML pages for YaBB SE? This is utterly alien territory for me. And if we can get this information into the public gaze it can benefit the whole YaBB SE community.

[[Unknown]]

Like I said, put in the output buffering.  I don't have time right this moment, but if you want me to do it for you I'll need FTP information.

-[Unknown]

[I, Brian]

Sincere thanks for offering, [unknown]. I tried the output buffering without success on apache. I'm still holdiong out for a reply from hprod, but if there's none by the end of the week I'll give you whatever ftp access you want. I'd still prefer a public solution but if that works I'll happily post it for others to use.

[I, Brian]

If it's of any help, I was asking about the output buffering issue at Sitepoint weeks ago:

http://www.sitepointforums.com/showthread.php?threadid=112152

Hopefully, the latter suggestion by pippo may be of help.

[I, Brian]

Asked again - the word from Sitepoint is that output buffering *will not* be enough:

http://www.sitepointforums.com/showthread.php?postid=824592

The forum code itself needs changing, as hprod did, to allow indexing.

It would be nice if someone could actually investigate a solution for this. But I guess no one will - not who wants to publicly share a solution, anyway.

I guess I'll give it a few more days and then look to convert to IPB or phpbb.

[Daniel Hofverberg]

I will try to look into this over the weekend, and will try to implement it on my forum (I use Apache and I believe mod_rewrite is enabled, so that shouldn't be an issue).

I'm no expert on PHP, but I'll keep you posted anyway.

And by the way, even without any changes, many search engines can spider YaBB SE forums - They just often have a hard time with it, but my forum was spidered the last time I checked so it's certainly not impossible.

[Anguz]

I'm still learning to code, but have been for a while, so I know a bit more now...

I'm interested in this topic very much, so I'll do some search on the subject, I'm sure it've been discussed a thousand times in other boards, so there must be something

if I manage to get it to work, I'll try to explain it in detail

I'm also checking some other tips to improve search engine ranking, so after making it easy to be spidered, I'll try to think of some things to improve the pages for the spiders

[John Galt]

My YaBBS, is a link off my Web Site, so submitting to search engines for me is only a matter of the site, that's in html.
Since getting listed is critical, that's one way around it, however getting listed is another matter. They...Goggle, Yahoo e.t.c. have gotten rather pickey about what's getting listed.

So here is a link for what I consider the best infromation on HOW to get listed to begin with.  
www.selfpromotion.com

[zeroweb]

Couldn't you use a cron job to alter a robots.txt file each night, specifically giving the spiders some starting places to dive into (aka, each board's post listing) ??

For my site, Google seems to spider down to the level of each board listing, but never individual posts. Call me crazy, but I would think the semicolons in the URLS are most likely not taken very well...

-mark