SEO4SMF – My experiences a month in
One of the things you’ll notice as a forum admin is that it can be very difficult to get a steady stream of search engine traffic. Not impossible, but forum pages often have a lot of HTML fluff like tables and JavaScript and usually have problems with most pages looking very similar to a search engine crawler.
Add to that the theory that dynamic pages with query strings don’t do as well as static pages and your forum is facing an uphill battle to be indexed well.
One of the traditional suggestions is to use mod_rewrite to come up with so-called search engine friendly URLs. There are arguments on both sides of the coin, but I’ve had better luck with pages that look static compared to those that have a query string. And since I was starting up a new forum I decided to try a SMF mod called SEO4SMF that rewrites the pages from /index.php?t=123.0 to /the-thread-title-t123.0.html.
That was a month ago. At the time my photography forum had about 1,500 posts although about half of those were in private discussions between moderators and admin. But Google had less than 50 pages indexed, and most of those were in the supplemental index. Obviously not a good thing.
Now a month later I’m up to about 250 indexed with around 100 in the supplemental index. Still not great, but at least moving in the right direction.
One thing I did that’s not related to SEO4SMF but is to the SEO success of my forum is to wrap the thread titles in an h1 tag. SMF doesn’t seem to wrap any type of semantic tags (paragraphs, headings, etc) around the thread content and that is potentially a bad thing. I’m also planning on wrapping each individual thread in a paragraph tag and seeing if that makes a difference.
What does it do?
The reason I installed SEO4SMF in the first place was the mod_rewrite it does on the URLs. Whether that really makes a difference is a point of argument on web design forums but I prefer the look of static pages whether it makes a difference in SEO or not.
What I think probably made the biggest difference is that SEO4SMF fills in the meta description and meta keywords tags from the content of the first post in a thread. I believe this helps a lot with search engines treating each of your pages as different from the others.
And I was very surprised that SEO4SMF even takes care of the 301 redirects from the old style /index.php?t=123.0 style URL to the newly rewritten URLs. This was actually my biggest concern about installing the mod and I spent a few hours working out whether I could handle the rewrites myself before realizing that SEO4SMF handles it automatically.
Problems with SEO4SMF
I did come across a couple of snags with SEO4SMF though.
The first snag was that the XML sitemap would include the board name even if I turned that option off. By default SEO4SMF creates URLs like /board_name/thread_title-t123.0.html. I elected not to use the board name as part of my URLs because I move threads between boards and don’t want any problems with duplicate content. But that’s exactly what I would have if the sitemap was giving one URL and the actual pages give another. A little PHP hacking and that problem was taken care of.
The other issue I have that I haven’t found a solution to is that when you search your forum the resultant URLs are empty-t123.0.html. They still work since SEO4SMF pulls the topic id from the end, but it’s not clean enough for my tastes. I’m hoping this one is fixed in an update soon.
So, does it work?
It sure seems to. I don’t know whether it was the h1 tags that I put in, the XML sitemaps, the HTML sitemap, the rewritten URLs, or the meta description tags; but something sure seems to have made a difference. The percentage of my forum pages in the supplemental index has gone down while the total number of pages has gone up.
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