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Discussion of SEO for Fireboard Forums

Oct 06 2008

Discussion of SEO for Fireboard Forums

Monday, 06 October 2008

Fireboard Forums I hope this will be the first of a series of open discussions focusing on popular Joomla extensions.

A very smart SEO Club member ( Suchmaschinenoptimierung Joomla ) helped me brainstorm a list of things to be aware of when optimizing a site with Fireboard. I'm going to give those here and then turn if over to you guys for any other tips, tricks or problems that you have.

1) Using 'RE:' for All Replies

This is an example of one page with two URLs, a clear duplicate content problem:

forums/general/form-search-not-working
forums/general/re-form-search-not-working

Solution: go to administrator / components / com_fireboard / and on line 1306 change DEFINE('_POST_RE', 'Re:'); to DEFINE('_POST_RE', '');

2) Posts Having Same Name

If you have two posts both titled "Welcome", you'll one be able to see one.

Solution: Avoid Artio and SEF Advanced. Use sh404SEF and chose to insert the post ID number in the URL.

3) Spam Problems

After creating search result pages to index, Google is now indexing potential Fireboard replies, complete with a quote from a previous poster. Just click "Submit" and you're done. This is a spammers delight.

Solution: Turn off public posting on Fireboard.

4) Site Map

It's useful to get your forum posts included in a sitemap:

Solution: Use SEF Service Map with the Fireboard plugin. This should work for 1.0 and 1.5.

5) Known Bugs

Pagination. Often breaks inside posts and inside categories.
Rather than using anchors, the post ID number is inserted by modules and the search form:

Original post: http://www.rsjoomla.com/index.php/RSform-Showcase/310-Form-using-css.html

Reply: http://www.rsjoomla.com/index.php/RSform-Showcase/4605-ReForm-using-css.html (two problems for the price of one here)

How URL should be: http://www.rsjoomla.com/index.php/RSform-Showcase/310-Form-using-css.html#4605

Pagination divides posts into seperate folders. Ideally they would all appear on the same folder level:

forum/10-computer-explodes.html

forum/10-computer-explodes/page-2.html

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Comments (14) Add Comment

Pete

October 07, 2008

Point 4:

Steve, do you think this trick from Mathias would to the Job as fine as the mentioned extension?
http://blog.j...uper-secret-sitemap-trick.html

Cheers

Pete

pippo morba

October 07, 2008

Hi, Fireboard RC2 has been released, do you think it will solve the known bugs you have listed in the article?
http://www.be...catid,78/limit,10/limitstart,0/

Tom Thorns

October 07, 2008

I've got loads of duplicate content issues on my main site due to the replies on the forum having their unique id number inserted. I'm thinking the best course of action will be to just switch to phpbb using the rokbridge once I pluck up the courage to migrate over to J1.5!

Tom.

Steve Burge

October 07, 2008

Hi Tom - What kind of DC issues are you finding?

Hi Pippo - I think pagination is the only one of these issues they're looking at for 1.0.5RC2.

Daniel Wolff

October 07, 2008

Hi There,

is missing the file name at tip #1:

Solution: go to administrator / components / com_fireboard / and on line 1306 change DEFINE('_POST_RE', 'Re:'); to DEFINE('_POST_RE', '');

Daniel Wolff

October 07, 2008

tip # 4) Site Map:

I didn't find the SEF Service Map for J! 1.5. I'm using xMap:

http://joomla...o.cr/downloads/cat_view/1-xmap

and here goes the FB Xmap plug-in:

http://joomla...22e0bf43803187d8b64ede4583cf56

Steve Burge

October 07, 2008

Thanks Dasmonstrum - fixed the code ommission and I'll add Xmap too.

pippo morba

October 08, 2008

Steve, file name in your
"go to administrator / components / com_fireboard / and on line 1306 "
is still missing!
and FireboardRC2 has already been released 2 days ago, they are looking for 1.0.5 now...
Dasmonstrum, SEF service map 104 is compatible with 1.5 with legacy

Tom Thorns

October 08, 2008

Hi Steve,

In Google Webmaster Tools I've got nearly 100 instances of duplicate title tags, in total there are over 300 individual urls involved - every single one of them is a forum post that has one or more replies, where each reply is given a unique url based on it's id number. Leaving the id out of the urls isn't an option for me as there are already posts with the same title! I just hope Google is clever enough to realise what is going on and recognise that it's only a forum!

Tom.

Johan Janssens

October 09, 2008

@Steve : Let's please correctly inform people about duplicate content, Google has once more put information out that this issue is alot less severe as people are thinking. More info : http://googlewebmastercentral....nalty.html

@Tom : You don't need to worry about duplicate content issues on your blog. Google does an excellent job recognizing the multiple URL's, what is most important in your case is descriptive page titles.

Cheers,

Johan

Steve Burge

October 09, 2008

Hi Johan

I'll make the same comment here as I did on Arno's blog:

http://woofan...-content-what-does-google-think

Spend a while reading Google's official blogs and you start to see that "what is" often needs to be replace with "what we'd like" or "what we're aiming for".

It took me just a couple of minutes to find at least 4 URLs for this article:

1) http://www.woofandwarp.com/joo...ogle-think

2) http://www.woofandwarp.com/blo...ogle-think

3) http://www.woofandwarp.com/ind...cle=&id=32

4) http://www.woofandwarp.com/com...ogle-think

Also, the article still comes up through broken URLs rather than producing a 404 page:

a) http://www.woofandwarp.com/ind...gole-think

b) http://www.woofandwarp.com/joo...fgertergdf

... and so on. I'll be sticking with 1 URL per page.

Barrie North

October 09, 2008

Hi Johan,

I would add to Steve's contention that duplicate content/pagerank dilution is a real issue in Joomla.

Duplicate content in Joomla is caused by issues in the SEF routing (third party extensions can be just as guilty). I most often see it when page does not have a menu item associated with it, for example when the link comes from a category view and then also a module like Latest News. You end up with two links to the same page, for example:

Joomla 1.5 Template Tutorial (page rank 4)
Joomla 1.5 Template Tutorial (page rank 5)

Google does not seem to be able to spot these as duplicate content, and has treated them as separate page, each earning page rank. The problem is not duplicate content, its pagerank dilution. With a single URL for that page, my PR 4 and 5 would be combined, hopefully with a slight bump

.

http://www.compassdesigns.net/...oomla.html

Ronildo Costa

October 10, 2008

Wow cool article, I will try translate it for brazilian-portuguese and do a post in my personal blog.

Beetham Tower

October 13, 2008

This is article has been useful as am currently considering what forum to use on my site. While it might be possible to optimise Fireboard I still think that the PhpBB forum bridge will be a better option.

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