Tech Titbits » SEO

Add canonical links to phpBB

Ellimist — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 11:21:12 +0000

It’s old news that Google and other major search engines have added support for the tag to help cut down on duplicate indexing of web pages. While plugins for WordPress, Drupal and Magneto E-Commerce have been released, there has been none such modification for phpBB, where it is, arguably, most needed.

phpBB administrators have used various methods to cut down on this duplicate indexing issue, but adding a canonical URL seems to be the most subtly effective way. Google honours this tag very strongly, and upon finding it in a web page, it should only index the canonical page.

In the view of all this, I have put together a mod for phpBB3 to add the canonical links to phpBB board pages. The Canonical URL mod adds these lines to the phpBB pages :

In the index page :

In the forum pages :

In the topic pages :

For global threads* :

phpBB.com support thread :

http://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/canonical_url/support/mod_discussion_canonical_url-t_875

Download modification :

Note :

Normally, global threads will have canonical URLs like this :

If you want the global threads to have canonical URLs with an “f=Y” query string, you just need to make a little change to the code. After installing the mod, open viewtopic.php.
Find :

   'U_CANONICAL'    => generate_board_url() . "/viewtopic.$phpEx?" . (($topic_data['topic_type'] == POST_GLOBAL) ? '' : "f=$forum_id&") . "t=$topic_id" . (($start) ? "&start=$start" : ''),

In-line Find :

? ''

Replace with :

? "f=Y&"

Replace ‘Y’ with the forum id of the forum you want your global threads to belong to.

Prevent duplicate indexing while moving threads in phpBB

Ellimist — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 16:48:32 +0000

Moving phpBB topic/thread

Moving a thread from one forum to another cause duplicate indexing issues in phpBB3. In such cases, both the old URL and the new URL return a “200 Found” header response, even though the thread doesn’t exist in the old forum. Ideally, the old URL should 301 redirect to the new URL. In this post we’ll learn how to do this.

phpBB uses query strings like f=X&t=Y to determine which thread to serve, where ‘X’ is the forum id and ‘Y’ is the thread id. In a “view topic” URL, the f=X part of the query string serves no purpose except to note which forum the user is browsing and accordingly reflect it in the “Who is online” page. In fact, threads can be accessed using any ‘f=X’ value, even using non-existant forum ids. This isn’t much of a problem in normal situation, as the threads are linked using their corresponding forum ids, but the duplicate indexing problem arises when a thread(s) is moved from on forum to another.

Since we need to change query strings here, neither Redirect nor RedirectMatch will work as they don’t take query strings into account. We need to use RedirectCond using QUERY_STRING and a RewriteRule directive to externally rewrite the URL. We will will also send a “301 Permanently Moved” response header so that the spiders know the page has been moved. Let us suppose that a thread with thread id 5 is being moved from forum with forum id 1 to forum with id 2. Therefore, the old URL :

http://domain.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5

And the new URL :

http://domain.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5

We need to redirect the first URL to the second. Add these codes to your .htaccess file :

RewriteEngine On # Skip this if you have already turned on the rewriting engine
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^f=1\&t=5$
RewriteRule ^viewtopic\.php$ /viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^f=1\&t=5\&start=([0-9]*)$
RewriteRule ^viewtopic\.php$ /viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5&start=%1 [R=301,L]

Skip the first line if you have already turned on the rewriting engine in your .htaccess file. The second RewriteRule redirects the other pages of the thread (with URL like viewtopic.php?f=X&t=Y&start=10). For each thread moved, we need to add these directives in the .htaccess file, changing the forum ids and topic id’s as necessary.

This method seems tedious and cumbersome, but this is the only method I could devise as of now. If anyone has a better method, you are welcome to leave a comment.

Add keywords and description to phpBB’s index page without installing a mod

Ellimist — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 09:15:41 +0000

In these days of intelligent search engines, meta keywords and descriptions do not play a major role in SEO. Crawlers are more interested in the contents of the page rather than it’s keywords and descriptions. However, some people might still want to add keywords and descriptions to their pages, seeing that search engines like Yahoo still put some weightage on them.

A vanilla phpBB installation does contain keyword and description meta element, but they do not have any content. Here’s an easy to add meta keywords and description to phpBB’s index page without installing and/or maintaining any kind of a mod.

Go to /styles/prosilver/template/ and open the overall_header.html file with your favourite text editor. Click Edit > Select all, or just press ‘Ctrl +A’. After that, copy the selected code by clicking Edit > Copy or by pressing ‘Ctrl + V’.
Create a new HTML file in the same directory and name it index_header.html.
Open the newly created file and paste the contents of the clipboard in it.
In index_header.html, find :
Replace with :
Find :
Replace with :
Open /styles/prosilver/template/index_body.html.
Find :
Replace with :

From now on remember to update index_header.html when you make changes to overall_header.html, or else, the changes won’t show up in the index page.

WWW or no-WWW?

Ellimist — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:18:18 +0000

Webmasters often face this dilemma – to include www in front of their domain or to exclude it. This is an oft-argued about topic in many webmasters’ discussion forums. However, there are some advantages and disadvantages on both sides.

Advantages :
Not using WWW :

WWW is actually a subdomain. Would you like users to access your site using a subdomain?
WWW, as pointed out by No-WWW.org, is deprecated. There is no purpose of typing www into the address bar except following a premeditated custom.
Users have to type less into the address bat to access your website.
Long domain names look better without the www.
According to some, not using www has a geekyness or coolness factor associated with it.

Using WWW :

People tend to trust sites which use WWW. Many take a WWW at the front of the domain name to be a sign of reliability and trust.
Most of the biggest players in the web industry use a WWW before their domain names.

Disadvantages :

Not using WWW :

People tend to think that sites not using www are unreliable and unscrupulous.
Not using WWW presents some difficulties while load balancing. The most common load balancing setup involves duplicating the files and the databases across different servers and pointing the WWW subdomain to those servers using CNAME records. But according to DNS specifications, bare domain names cannot have CNAME records. So, what is commonly done is, the domain is pointed to the different servers using A records instead of CNAME records. This essentially results in load sharing, not load balancing. In this configuration, the user won’t automatically load the page from the least loaded server, instead the requested page will be randomly served by any of the server.

Using WWW :

There is actually no feasible disadvantage of using WWW. However, we can say that while requesting a page, using www, we actually have to type out 3 extra Ws, and those three extra Ws are sent to the DNS servers for resolving. However, in this age of gigabit communication, such things hardly matter.

Now you’ll have to choose what you should implement for you website: WWW or no-WWW. Here are the .htaccess codes for redirecting users from www to non-www URLs and vice versa :

Redirection Codes :

WWW to Non-WWW :

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

Non-WWW to WWW :

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

However, there is a common misconceptions about WWW/Non-WWW :

Q. Having both WWW and Non-WWW URLs valid is bad for SEO and will result in penalization.

A. This isn’t sufficient evidence to support this statement. Search engines like Google and Yahoo! have algorithms that are intelligent enough to know that www and non-www versions of a website are same. However, in some rare cases, it has been found that www and non-www versions of a page have different pageranks. So, it’s best to specify your preference (www/ non-www) using Google Webmaster Tools and direct all traffic to either www or non-www versions of your site.

Prevent duplicate indexing of phpBB3 threads by Google

Ellimist — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 08:12:59 +0000

In a default phpBB3 installation(without an SEO mod), the same thread can be accessed through many URLs. For example, the thread Favourite Animorphs fanfiction can be accessed through these different URLs :

http://animorphsfanforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=60

http://animorphsfanforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&p=659

http://animorphsfanforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=60&p=659

http://animorphsfanforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=60&p=659#p659

http://animorphsfanforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=60

http://animorphsfanforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=659

http://animorphsfanforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=60&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

http://animorphsfanforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=60&st=0&sk=t&sd=a#p659

The agressive Googlebot might pick almost all of those links and it might lead to potential ranking problems in SERPs.

One way to resove this duplicate indexing is to install an SEO mod like PhpBB-SEO.com SEO mod or Handyman’s SEO mod. But, installing and updating a mod with each phpBB3 update and/or mod update might get harrowing and burdensome. An alternative, albeit easier way to prevent duplicate indexing is to add these lines to your robots.txt :

User-agent: * Disallow: /viewtopic.php?p= Disallow: /viewtopic.php?=&p= Disallow: /viewtopic.php?t= Disallow: /viewtopic.php?start= Disallow: /*&view=previous Disallow: /*&view=next Disallow: /*&sid= Disallow: /*&p= Disallow: /*&sd=a Disallow: /*&start=0

This will forbid all bots following robots.txt directives to crawl the redundant URLs. Your threads will only be accessible to the bots through the URL http://www.domain.com/viewtopic.php?f=X&t=X.

Note(1): If you display Google Adsense ads in your forum pages, you might need to allow the Google Adsense bot(Mediapartners-Google) to access the ‘forbidden’ URLs, so that it can crawl the pages and display relevant ads. So, you need to add these ‘extra’ lines to your robots.txt :

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google Disallow:

This will allow the Mediapartners-Google bot to access the forbidden URLs.

Note(2): If your forum is on a subdirectory(say /forum/) rather than the root, append “/forum” to the robots.txt directives. It should look like this :

User-agent: * Disallow: /forum/viewtopic.php?p= Disallow: /forum/viewtopic.php?=&p= Disallow: /forum/viewtopic.php?t= Disallow: /forum/viewtopic.php?start= Disallow: /forum/*&view=previous Disallow: /forum/*&view=next Disallow: /forum/*&sid= Disallow: /forum/*&p= Disallow: /forum/*&sd=a Disallow: /forum/*&start=0

If you face any problems, leave your comments and I’ll look into it.