phpBB search engine indexer

[David]

http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=236489-a search engine opt. for forums

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This mod in effect creates "archive" pages that are formatted to be only vaguely human readable, but highly accessible to seach engines.

I am sure anyone who has done extensive web searching has found these pages! hence there is little question the mod works

Installation is easy time wise and should be testable from our mirrors.

There are however a lot of issues in customising this mod to get it right.

So whilst it will be placed "on the list" it will not happen instantly.

It is though a very valuable feature to have, so it will happen.
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Making a little head way here, but connectity via our ISP NTL is making life more than a little difficult The office mirror servers cannot be configured to use a proxy as they make serious pretense at having the myfreeforum.org address and hence catch this address before passing our to the real internet. But without a proxy configuration at the moment anything external like google adverts or the coop ad network are almost stone dead thus things verge on the untestable unless we strip all external stuff out of the mirror.

Since this mod is not urgent, it is pointless breaking things just to be moving along faster with it.
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Making some more headway with it, found and fixed one bug, but it is actually poorly done given the intention

It does need some major reworking which I will do over the next few days.
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Still tinkering with this. Found another issue, there is what you might call a security hole in the system There are so many potential holes in web server security that this sort of thing really does need checking. In this case you can argue that the hole is only a hole if another part of our security is broken. Since it isn't then we could potentially allow this issue to creep in without security really being compromised!

A little like leaving a car window partially open on the grounds that other locks are perfectly adaquate. But down that road lies danger, you then only need one slip up which would normally be perfectly harmless and your whole system is open
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I think we are very close to this being installed

I have improved apon this hack in a number of ways.

Firstly I have almost totally stripped out all spurious detail from the templates used. So the archive pages contain nothing but the author, subject and message. This allows a search engine to see the pure meat of the page, without a whole lot of distracting text.

Secondly I have added JavaScript that will after a 100 second delay, take the user to the same post in your "real" forum. There is also a link to allow them to directly do this. I have made the delay long, out of respect for the fact that people want to read what they find, and it is also considered "bad form" by search engines for there to be a quick page change. The page redesign also makes it a bit plainer to the user that this is an "archive" and not the real pages.

Last but not least, the pagination is forced at 200 posts. This should concentrate more chunks of meaty nourishment for the search engines it will also ameliorate concerns that search engines do not like to see duplicate content.

On the office mirror I have made a link to the archive next to "Create your own free forum" a link that will therefore not show if you have paid for advert removal!

There are still a few points to consider prior to release.

1) Can we link into the archive more effectively?
2) Can we show the archived topic in a more SEO way?
3) People have different views on SEO, so some people may think this hack a problem. So should it be optional?
4) The hack displays in default subSilver rendering, could it conform to your forum style? Does it matter?
5) Can and should myfreeforum.org use more aggressive google advertising on archive pages?
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Here is a picture of advertising as I htink it should appear in the archive:



This image shows another change to the orginal hack, the original hack left smilies unparsed, which adds junk text to the search engine. Since removing the smilies would lose context for readers, I think it is best to show them.[/img]
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[David]

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Added a few more final tweaks.

One of which gets away from it using any odd server tweaks at all, but which does get the same slight improvements it was using the tweaks to do. This gives it a 100% clean bill of health for security.

Secondly the page title is now simply the thread title, an SEO measure already in use on the main site.

Last but not least subject tags are h1 headings, which gives them an SEO prominance.
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The system is now there on all forums e.g.

http://forum.myfreeforum.org/archive

but will be useless until google can see links to it. On my mirrors I placed the link next to "Create your own Free Forum" a link that only appears on forums which have not gone advert free It seems a pain to have to ask people on advert free forums to create their own links, but I am still looking for a good alternative.
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I am thinking of ways round the one major flaw in the system. Google works best if it does not have to follow deeply nested linked. Currently the archive is 3 deep:

1) Click to the archive
2) Click to the forum
3) Click to the topic

If I was to make the Topic Count for each forum on the index page a link to that forum in the archive, then this would boost the system a lot!
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[David]

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