Make your forum spiderable and search engine friendly

Here is the logics:

LoginWithUserDisabledCookies
=> SessionLoginNoCookiesNeeded
=> LongURLs
=> UglyForSpiders

You guys/gals are saying: don't worry about users with disabled cookies, it's their own fault. I am saying: use another method to make your site nice for spiders even with LongURLs. You do this by

CreateRSS2FileInRoot
=> SubmitAsGoogleSitemap
=> PrettyForGoogle

Remember that Google is not the only one search engine on earth. What about another?

Of course it's users problem. They disable cookies = they don't want to be authorized. What else?

This is very ridiculous :)

=> PrettyForGoogle

My forum, too, is pretty, but for Michelle Pfeiffer :)))

I like tips #2, #5, #6, #8 and #9 and think they're probably the most important for Google and any other search engine.

As for the <h1> debate, it's true you can have as many <h1> tags as you want, but it's also true you can style your text with old <font> tags, but this is not the way the modern standards are necessarily meant to be used.

The <h1> tag is really meant to be a single header about the main purpose of that particular page. Then, you can break into sub categories, or <h2> as many times as necessary. Then, if you have subs for each <h2> tag, you can use <h3>, <h4>, etc...

For my site, I already have an <h1> tag on every page, so using that technique with an <h2> tag would probably be just as useful.

You should also look into creating a sitemap of all the links in your site using .xml (for Google), .txt (for Yahoo) and .html for the rest of of visiting your site. I know there are a lot of other search engines, but I'm confident that if you follow the rules outlined and DO optimize your page for these 2 big search engines, most of the other engines will pick you up too. If not, there's not much else you can do unless you want to start breaking rules.

Check out these links if you're interested:

Google Webmaster Tips

Yahoo Sitemap Submissions

General Sitemap Info for many engines

Hope this helps, and oh yeah, thanks for helping me make my discussion board more search friendly and standards compliant!

Here's my site, which is still a work in progress if you're curious:

CardMSG | MAGIC

As far as I know, sitemaps are not giving you extra page rank or something. Yes, it's a very good idea for the search engines, since in that case, they will have "less tasks" to work on, but trust me - this doesn't affect your indexing in other way. If your pages are valid, and correctly created, they will be indexed anyway.

You're right Paul, nothing will increase your page ranking except have a relavent content rich site that's constructed properly and linked to from other quality sites. The sitemap is just an easy way to keep track of what pages are in your site and gives the search engine spiders an easy way to follow links.

Some of us don't think that the spiders are the most important thing and must run our lives, and in opposite - we avoid them.

I don't know why people mess up "site" with "forum", but obviously they like to talk all together in the same time.

The truth is that people ever collect themselves in groups by interests and that's all :)

The commands <INDEX,FOLLOW> and the mod_rewrite mode are enough for one that has mass desires :)

In general, I'm myself too lazy to create these sitemap scripts. It will waste a lot of time, and nobody will pay for it, despite search engine gurus should pay each site for doing this job for them ;-)

You may, without any terms, only write to paper when you remember something about this, and some day to write for the spider lovers one addon called "Spider me!"

For 10 (?) dollars :)

They can buy it and later to be spidered and paid for the advertisments on their sites :)

I think, with miniBB they will be "spidered" by default :-)

Let's see.

THANK YOU!

Open your templates/forums.html and place as the very first line:
<h1>{$sitename}</h1>

How do I get the h1 tags to surround the main site title name JUST on the homepage... but let the other pages have their own specific h1 tags related to the topics of those pages... ?

trc4949
Sorry, the question is not understood completely, but... you may specify any tags in bb_plugins.php accordingly to $action variable. Like:

if($action==''){
//first page
$h1a='<h1>'; $h1b='</h1>';
}
else{
$h1a='<h2>'; $h1b='</h2>';
}

then in all templates it will be possible to specify:

{$h1a}{$sitename}{$h1b}