1

Topic: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

Can punBB have it so that each new post creates a new page that can be indexed by google? is this possible or can it be made possible?

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2

Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

Anything is possible.  But, a function like that would add a lot of lines of code that I would guess they would like to stay away from (keeping the code trim and fast).
A mod would seem to be the likely route, and is something that I would be interested in.
But what do I know, I am still new here.

Aaron

3

Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

ryant wrote:

Can punBB have it so that each new post creates a new page that can be indexed by google?

Do you mean like this? http://www.google.com/search?q=punbb+hcgtv

4

Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

yup exactly like that.. will Google index the topic posts automatically without each one being a seperate page?

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5

Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

In order to have good search engine rankings, it is absolutely necessary to have static URLs. The dynamic URLs don't cut it. That is one of the things I have been looking into doing, but I don't have the expertise at it that is really neededl. From my research, it looks like the ForceType directive is the way to go. There is info at:
http://www.websitepublisher.net/article … dly_urls/3

If someone wanted to do a tutorial on how to do this, that could be understood by someone inexperienced at Apache and server management such as myself, that would be great. It's a bit over my head, though I'll give it a try if I have to when 1.2 is released. But any forum I use absolutely must be able to rank well on search engines. Which means the static URLs are an absolute must.

6

Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

ryant wrote:

will Google index the topic posts automatically without each one being a seperate page?

Yes, Google spiders all content, you should see the spiders hitting my sites in real time.

There's also all these spiders:
Googlebot
MSNBot
Inktomi Slurp
GigaBot
Google AdSense
BaiDuSpider
AskJeeves
Alexa

7 (edited by Connorhd 2005-01-04 18:46)

Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

Results 1 - 10 of about 40,300 from forums.punbb.org for  punbb. - http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Af … &meta= - i think we can safely say google indexes punbb fine

i don't think google has any problems with dymanic urls however other search engines might not be so good

plus 1.2 has:
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, FOLLOW" />
on certain pages to make sure only the right pages are indexed... e.g. post.php should not

if you want a directory style structure for your punbb then you could use this:
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/mod_re … ator.shtml
to generate mod_rewrite rules for apache

8 (edited by dot 2005-01-04 18:55)

Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

Search "forum software" and you will find that punbb is not even in the top 1000 results. The problem isn't the index page, because that is a static URL. "Punbb" will come up fine because it is the title of a static page, and it's a keyword with little competition. The problem are all the threads. If the subject of a thread is "dog breath," for instance, that is not going to show up in Google if it is in a punbb forum as it now stands. Neither Google or any other search engine does a good job on dynamic URLs that have the ? and other characters in them. In fact, the ranking will be poor to non-exisistent.

I am not an expert on the why of this, but I am an expert on getting things to rank high in search engines. And I can state for an absolute fact that in order for this to rank well for a lot of terms, which it should if you want to get a lot of traffice, then there must be static URLs. That isn't really a debating point. It's a well known fact among search engine optimization experts. The question is how is the best and easiest way to achieve those static URLs.

Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

ironically i often see posts from this forum when i am searching in google, without the words punbb or forum

Search "forum software" and you will find that punbb is not even in the top 1000 results.

however as far as i know forums.mypunbb.org is counted differently to punbb.org on google so why would the forums have an effect on the ranking of punbb.org?

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Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

I'm not quite sure of the question. But as far as Google is concerned,
forums.mypunbb.org
and
punbb.org
are two different domain web address, or two different web sites.

I guess rather than debate whether the static URLs are best from a search engine optimization and ranking standpoint, I'll work on how to turn the forum URLs into static addresses using .htaccess or the ForceType Directive. If anyone has a link to a very simple tutorial on this to get me started, that would be great.

Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

dot wrote:

I am not an expert on the why of this, but I am an expert on getting things to rank high in search engines. And I can state for an absolute fact that in order for this to rank well for a lot of terms, which it should if you want to get a lot of traffice, then there must be static URLs. That isn't really a debating point. It's a well known fact among search engine optimization experts. The question is how is the best and easiest way to achieve those static URLs.

No you aren't an expert. Google (and every other SE) handles plop/glop/yop the exact same way as plop?glop&yop. The idea about static urls being better was valid when altavista was No 1, back before 2000, because it didn't. But even alatvista indexes dynamic pages with arguments now.

I only see another attempt to add unneeded bloatware to PunBB, and btw, the best way to achieve static URLs is by giving directives to your web server (usually apache), this has nothing to do with PHP if your webserver isn't using the right module (mod_rewrite for example)

Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

Connorhd wrote:

why would the forums have an effect on the ranking of punbb.org?

Because there is a link to punbb.org named punbb at the bottom of each page big_smile

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Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

analogue wrote:

I only see another attempt to add unneeded bloatware to PunBB, and btw, the best way to achieve static URLs is by giving directives to your web server (usually apache), this has nothing to do with PHP if your webserver isn't using the right module (mod_rewrite for example)

This is what I do on my Nucleus sites, my .htaccess file:

<FilesMatch "^item$">
    ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch "^archive$">
    ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch "^member$">
    ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch "^archives$">
    ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch "^category$">
    ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch "^blog$">
    ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</FilesMatch>

The item file:

<?

include('./fancyurls.config.php');
include('./config.php');

$data = explode("/",serverVar('PATH_INFO'));
$itemid = intval($data[1]);

selector();

?>

So any url like this: http://hcgtv.com/index.php?itemid=1
Turns into this: http://hcgtv.com/item/1

I don't know if something similar can be done with PunBB?

Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

i gave one that generates the mod rewrite for you you would just need to mod punbb to use the new style of links - http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/mod_re … ator.shtml

also having a quick look around at this i think search engines are happy with pages with a ? in the URL is pages that use session ids... e.g. Phpbb which are trully dynamic (e.g. everytime the search engine visits the pages are different) whereas punbb pages which just have get variables are static enough

Googles own guidelines on this say
# If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a '?' character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them small.
# Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session ID's or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
# Your pages are dynamically generated. We are able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because our web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content, we limit the amount of dynamic pages we index.

from this i can see that huge numbers of posts may not be indexed but alot will and dynamic pages will not otherwise hinder the indexing by google of punbb forums

15

Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

thank you hcgtv

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Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

thank you hcgtv

Connorhd - I did not realize the Punbb pages were the same everytime. I thought they were like the phpbb pages which do change every time. So, maybe I am all wet on what is necessary. It would be a lot easier if I am.

Anyway, I will double check it by doing some searches on subjects of punbb threads, and checking forum info in some other places, also.

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Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

Yea if anybody does find a solid answer or solution to this problem, be sure to post it up in a new post for us all to see I think this would be a great asset to punBB to have each post put into a sub dir folder that links....

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Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

analogue wrote:
dot wrote:

I am not an expert on the why of this, but I am an expert on getting things to rank high in search engines. And I can state for an absolute fact that in order for this to rank well for a lot of terms, which it should if you want to get a lot of traffice, then there must be static URLs. That isn't really a debating point. It's a well known fact among search engine optimization experts. The question is how is the best and easiest way to achieve those static URLs.

No you aren't an expert. Google (and every other SE) handles plop/glop/yop the exact same way as plop?glop&yop. The idea about static urls being better was valid when altavista was No 1, back before 2000, because it didn't. But even alatvista indexes dynamic pages with arguments now.

I only see another attempt to add unneeded bloatware to PunBB, and btw, the best way to achieve static URLs is by giving directives to your web server (usually apache), this has nothing to do with PHP if your webserver isn't using the right module (mod_rewrite for example)

i'm agreeing with you since punbb doesn't use session ids there should be no problem and by searching in google you can see there is no problem with punbb being indexed

Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

Although Google does index the pages without problem, it would be very convenient if PunBB had some type of URL template variables.

I've done this before using a simple variable-rewrite function. The default PHP code might read something like this...

$by_post_url = 'viewtopic.php?pid=$1#p$1'; // <-- this variable is our template
$the_link = variable_rewrite($by_post_url, $pid);

It would output what happens now -
  http://punbb.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=29006#p29006.

But if we wanted to modify the URL, we could change the $by_post_url variable...

//$by_post_url = 'viewtopic.php?pid=$1#p$1';
$by_post_url = 'by-post-id/$1';
$the_link = variable_rewrite($by_post_url, $pid);

...and add the following line in our Apache setup...

RewriteRule ^by-post-id/[0-9]+$ viewtopic.php?pid=$1#p$1

Then in the forum, our link would look like this -
  http://punbb.org/forums/by-post-id/29006

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Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

ShawnBrown: I agree. Adding the ability to use "static" URL's without hacking up all the scripts is not a bad idea. It has been requested before. I don't think I will implement it exactly like you suggested though. Your suggestion requires that people edit all the scripts. I was thinking maybe something like this:

For viewtopic:
$the_link = generate_link('viewtopic.php', array('id' => 155), '155');  // The last parameter is the anchor

For post.php when quoting a post:
$the_link = generate_link('post.php', array('tid' => 155, 'qid' => 301));

Not sure exactly how though.


BTW, just for fun, I wanted to check if google was indeed indexing the forums here at punbb.org and here's the result:

http://www.google.se/search?hl=sv&q … &meta=

40 200 hits from forums.punbb.org alone. Hopefully that will put an end to the "you need static URL's in order for search engines to spider your site" bullshit. Looking at the results, you can see that scripts such as post.php are indexed as well. This will not happen with PunBB 1.2 as it outputs a ROBOTS meta tag that tells the spider not to index that particular page (NOINDEX, FOLLOW).

"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."

Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

Rickard wrote:

40 200 hits from forums.punbb.org alone. Hopefully that will put an end to the "you need static URL's in order for search engines to spider your site" bullshit. Looking at the results, you can see that scripts such as post.php are indexed as well. This will not happen with PunBB 1.2 as it outputs a ROBOTS meta tag that tells the spider not to index that particular page (NOINDEX, FOLLOW).

yeh i said that earlier just no one reads my posts tongue

as far as search engines are concerned punbbs urls ARE static ie every time them visit the site the old urls still relate to the same posts...

Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

Connorhd wrote:

yeh i said that earlier just no one reads my posts tongue

Oh, Connor said something. Next, please! smile

"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."

Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

Rickard wrote:

...Your suggestion requires that people edit all the scripts...

I was thinking that...
   $by_post_url = 'viewtopic.php?pid=$1#p$1';
      ...could be declared in a single file (like config.php or something).

And the...
   $the_link = variable_rewrite($by_post_url, $pid);
      ...line would be hard coded into each file.

To change the URLs, you'd just alter that one $by_post_url= declaration. I favor the viewtopic.php?pid=$1#p$1 format--with it's dollar-sign symbols--so that it's similar to Apache's rewrite format ... but this is just a matter of taste.

I think we're thinking the same thing basically ... I'm just not familiar enough with PunBBs internal structure to suggest a format consistent with the coding style you've already used.

The PHP code I'm using for the variable_rewrite() is...

function variable_rewrite($string, $one, $two='', $three='', $four='', $five='') {
    if ($string && $one) {
        $string = str_replace('$1', $one, $string);
        if ($two) {
            $string = str_replace('$2', $two, $string);
            if($three){
                $string = str_replace('$3', $three, $string);
                if($four){
                    $string = str_replace('$4', $four, $string);
                    if ($five) {
                        $string = str_replace('$5', $five, $string);
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    } else if (!$string)
        return null;
    return $string;
}
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Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

Ah, I see. Hmm.

"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."

Re: Can pubBB have its pages indexed?

ShawnBrown wrote:

To change the URLs, you'd just alter that one $by_post_url= declaration.

Actually, this method would require a small handful of templates... by-post, by-forum, by-topic, etc.

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