[ Closed ] Can pubBB have its pages indexed? (Page 1 of 2)

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

yup exactly like that.. 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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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).

Oh, Connor said something. Next, please!

Ah, I see. Hmm.