Search Engines Optimize

[Shadow's Pawn]

Actually, I couldn't get this to work properly either.. it calls the index page when you try to view a topic.  I have short urls installed.. maybe that's the problem?

I'm going to mess with it some more then I'll let you know what happens.

[Metho]

Oi! [Unknown] actually fixed this, but must've forgot to update his post with the code. Hehe. In this code:

Code Select Expand

 if (isset($thread))
 {
     global $currentboard, $threadid, $board, $start, $action;

     $result = mysql_query("
       SELECT ID_BOARD
       FROM {$db_prefix}topics
       WHERE ID_TOPIC= " . (int) $thread . "
       LIMIT 1") or database_error(__FILE__, __LINE__);
     list ($board) = mysql_fetch_row($result);
     mysql_free_result($result);

     $currentboard = $board;
     $threadid = (int) $thread;
     if (strpos($thread, '/') !== false)
       $start = substr($thread, strpos($thread, '/') + 1);
     $action = 'display';
     LoadBoard();
 }

Right above that first line just put global $thread;

Presto!

Methonis

[Shadow's Pawn]

Thanks!

[Shadow's Pawn]

Hprod's solution sounds kind of neat..   I might try that one out as well.

[sensovision]

Hi to everyone! sorry I'm joining this discussion so lately but I didn't spot it before.
First of all wish to say that I really appreciate to Unknown for pointing me to this thread, and big thank you once again Unknown for writing this mod, it's work like a charm for me
I think it would be better to have URLs in this format.
But I have one question for you, why on the mainidex I've see not URLs like:
index.php?thread=848
but this one:
index.php?thread=848/new;boardseen=1
is there any reason to have this URL of such format since it contain semicolons? but I don't think that it's major problem since posts in boards has correct format.
Ok now I've try to catch the time and ask few questions I have to posters:

Just so you don't think we are ignoring you, we have started working on a resolution to this issue for the next release.

David I really glad to know that you'll implement SE friendly URLs to next release of YaBB. But will you have backcompatible with old URL style? I hope that it will since some forums post links to my forum and also we have crosllinked posts which would be hard to correct manually.

i dont know what should be the Problem with the searchengines...

Yahoo & Google have indexed my Board well, google is daily on the Board, mostly with 2 IPs.

Surfy - actually I believe that only www.AllTheWeb.com has full index of my forum since last week he crawl 2000 pages from me... and previously he take good amount of pages...  But I'm not wonder how he done this since ATW was always ahead of SE technology and they even able to crawl links with sessions.
as for Google it's kind of lazy, he visit me daily but not take much pages... most he ever take per session was about 100 or so... I believe that he mainly pick links not from inside of boards pages but rather links which appear on mainindex as a last post, or last post which is displayed on http://www.pharos-search.com (not yet crawled as we have it only few days, previously this site has PR 5 and was known as http://links.weblamp.net ) , so I think that Google take mostly URLs from high ranked pages first. Same with Altavista, Inktomi and others... I think that they visit boards only occasionally. I'm guessing so since only some boards get traffic from Google... and rest are not... mostly those older ones... which appear on the time we wasn't crawled by engines.

This is all you need in the Google search bar:

link:http://www.forum-software.tld

Try that for www.vbulletin.com,
www.invisionboard.com, www.phpbb.com - and then for www.yabbse.org

I'll give you a clue to the rounded figures for backlinks:

12000, 9000, 112000 and...er, 105.

I, Brian Need to agree with you here. I also wonder why YaBB SE team don't wish to put direct URL to their community on the copyrigt area... since URL in this format:
http://www.yabbse.org/index.php?affiliate=Webmaster Key - Discussion Forums;l=http://forum.weblamp.net;v=YaBB SE 1.5.4
of course provide information about which version is most used and such but it keep spiders from counting this links as a backlink and it's sad fact for me since if all YaBB forums have this direct link to community we would get much more traffic from search engines and would easily compete with phpBB or any other software package since more and more people find out about YaBB(since I still meeting people who didn't heard about YaBB). I would really reccomend to put this into next release. Or maybe you may have both of links? one is less prominent which would be direct one and one more prominent for visitors, I would gladly put direct link myself but I'm not sure for which purposes used current tracking URL and maybe it's something important so I decide to ask about it on the community first. So folks, may I change my URL on forum to direct one or you prefer to leave it this way?

Brian, I absolutly agree with you.

Professionals from SE team - you are doing great job, but your forum now one of the most professional forums, I realy belive that permanent page location is the attribute of professionalism. And this is only first side on the other one is stopping indexing of everything but messages.... I know that <noindex></noindex> tags working in most cases. Then meta tags, somewhere in settings you should give us chances to insert information for such meta tags as
Code:
<meta name="keywords" content="">
<meta name="description" content="">  
<meta name="Author" content="">
<meta name="Author-Email" content="">
<meta name="Robots" content="all">
<meta name="Revisit" content="1 days">
<meta name="Classification" content="">
<meta name="Category" content=""">
<meta name="Copyright" content="">

hedging Actually there is no need for so much meta...  most of them are not used anyway.
I strongly believe that Keyword and description is more than enough

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.

Brian, description is used almost everywhere, even Google sometimes use it e.g. in cases when there is not enough text could be found on your page, as for keywords it's used by Inktomi and some smaller players of SE industry so it's good to have it as well.

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...

zeroweb I was thinking about some solution like you suggest, I mean to use cronjob which create static page with listing of all URLs need to be crawled, but I think that now it's not necessary, if you install Unknown's modification of code since it don't contain semicolons.  The only thing I still thinking is that maybe it's worth to make .htaccess to make boards look like directories e.g. make
myurl.com/forum/1
lead to board #1 of my board... it wouldn't be hard, the only thing I need to find out is how to make index.php to display this URLs, anyone can help me with this?

few that's was probably one of the longest posts I've wrote

[David]

It seems some threads are getting added to Google after this change.

[sensovision]

It seems some threads are getting added to Google after this change.

yup it should be so   I'm apply the mod some time ago and now just waiting for crawler to come and see how it will react for new form of URLs

[[Unknown]]

But will you have backcompatible with old URL style?

Sure will.

So folks, may I change my URL on forum to direct one or you prefer to leave it this way?

I suppose it doesn't really matter... but, it's probably fine either way.

-[Unknown]

[sensovision]

I suppose it doesn't really matter... but, it's probably fine either way.

trust me, it's really matter. Getting good inbound links from sites with PR at least 3 will give you major increasement in your PR and this site will get more relevancy on each search provided in Google. so direct links is really good thing. read any SEO community and you'll see all the power it possess.

[[Unknown]]

I suppose it doesn't really matter... but, it's probably fine either way.

trust me, it's really matter. Getting good inbound links from sites with PR at least 3 will give you major increasement in your PR and this site will get more relevancy on each search provided in Google. so direct links is really good thing. read any SEO community and you'll see all the power it possess.

As you read at the chat session announcement... soon we will be using a totally different URL.  So... umm, well, it won't matter that much.

-[Unknown]

[sensovision]

Unknown, I've just spot small bug which appear when I'm trying to split the thread... when I clicking on botton it redirects me to Index... anything could be done to fix this?

[[Unknown]]

It's because of thread being set... umm... I'll look into it.

-[Unknown]

[sensovision]

It's because of thread being set... umm... I'll look into it.

thanks!

[sensovision]

For everyone concerned I just wish to confirm that it's really working...   I've just check my statistic for 24 hours...  and know what I find out? previously Google doesn't take more than 100 pages per serssion, but today I've got this:

Googlebot/2.1 - +http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)  (328)

Also our pages are visited by polish crawler which usually only take main page and not go anywhere... but today it make a move

www.szukacz.pl/jakdzialarobot.html  (54)

so getting rid of semicolons was really worth thing to do I'm almost sure that now all bots will go deeper into forum if someone is interested I may inform him about statistic on crawling(just let me know).

Thank you Unknown, once again for making this possible!

[Fizzy]

[unknown]

I'm guessing that your mod won't allow for certain boards to be excluded from a spder crawl as the threads are indexed using their message number. Is that right ?

I would need to select which boards could or couldn't be spidered by using robots.txt
On mine, some boards are 100% in need of a good spidering, but the rest is just plain chit chat and I don't fancy having the spiders crawl through 1500 pointless threads.

Any thought on how I could get around that problem ?