Your opinions on phpbb-seo.com and SEO in general

[Martin_K]

I've put this here in the donators area, because it might help people express their opinions more openly and enable me to be more honest.

Our group is struggling to get noticed. We are a small group of Gas Safe Registered installers in the UK who want to give a voice to sole traders and small businesses who have virtually no representation in the industry despite being at least 50% of the 120,000 RGI's in the UK. HSE have given control of the Register to Capita who run Gas Safe Register. They are a a private company that has legal status, and are in effect 'the gas police'. Many onerous new regulations have been forced on us by EU Skills which regulates the industry. The people we want to represent have minimal input into the regulation of the industry, this is dominated by the 'big boys' like British Gas, the assessment centres, and the Carbon Monoxide lobby. The system doesn't work in that it produces maybe upto 80% of RGI's who do not work particularly safely.

My plan is to try to improve the quality and quantity of the Technical part of our forum as a way of attracting our target audience, so have set the bots to index this area only, (but this area requires registration as we don't want the public to see technical info on gas). So SEO is important to us, if we are to find 'like minded' installers who want to have a say in the way our working lives are regulated and controlled.

1) I get the feeling that the phpBB development team don't see SEO as particularly important, given that they build minimal SEO into the core and think it is an option that modders can provide. Maybe because they see phpBB as mainly aimed at small groups who want to communicate internally, and are not necessarily looking to expand or 'get noticed' on the Web. Maybe they see getting noticed as mainly a requirement for businesses looking to sell, and they are not aiming their product at businesses.

Maybe they see modern Search Engines as quite capable of indexing and listing posts, so meta content and so meta keyword and meta content description creation and other SEO tools are not seen as particularly important nowadays.

2) There is a barely hidden hostility to phpbb-seo.com from the phpBB team, maybe because they provide a pre-modded version that goes against their principles, or is it the quality of their offerings?

3) I did once try to install something from phpb-seo.com and couldn't manage to get it to install, maybe because my forum is already heavily modded. I find their own site baffling and confusing, and notice there are many requests for help there, that just get left unanswered.

4) How important is URL re-writing for SEO? This is obviously a big feature of the offerings from phpbb-seo.com, but there are also commercial offerings from Inveo who offer "Magic SEO URL's for phpBB 3". I notice that some of our competitors forum wise, for searches like "Vaillant Error Code/fault finding" etc use URL rewriting, and as they are aimed at the more general diy market, and allow the public access, and have lots of traffic to their sites, they are hard for us to compete with in terms of Search Result page ranking.

Any thoughts and advice would be welcome.

[Stoker]

I agree.

[Martin_K]

Stoker, Obviously not such an issue for you, as you have 3754 'members' (but how many of these are Bots?), and the search engines send plenty your way, as there is not too much competition, and the kind of search queries that bring people your way are not likely just to be members of the public with no interest in phpbb and your mods.

Code: Select all

<meta name="keywords" content="Your, opinions, on, phpbbseocom, and, SEO, in, general" />
<meta name="description" content="I've put this here in the donators area, because it might help people express their opinions more openly and enable me to be more honest.  Our group is struggling to get noticed. We are a small group ..." />

Seems to be working pretty well for the topic pages, which method did you use? Do you allow Bot access to the Donators area.

[Stoker]

Bots and guests has same permission.
The code is my secret and personal code. I think it might be similar to the one you linked to by amigo_jack.

You do know that bots needs to have access to your topics to be able to index them?
Im asking because it looks like you have blocked access for bots.

[Martin_K]

There should be bot access only to our Technical Talk section of the forum, all other forums are blocked.

[Stoker]

I see.
Content is king.
Linkbuilding is queen.

[Martin_K]

I favour opening more content up for public viewing, but as it is gas related, there are some worries the public will use the info to try to fix their own boilers. Maybe they should have a form to enter their 'Gas Safe Registration no." and promise that they are registered, and that we take no liability for them lying to us to gain access to the page. Anyone registered on the site (and therefore we have checked their registration) wouldn't get this gateway.

I also favour moving to a donation model instead of a Membership Model, like here offering some stuff for free, on registration, and more for donators, but the others have been hard to convince on this.

[Martin_K]

We could pretend we have a direct link to the Register database, and if the Reg no is of the wrong no. of characters give them a really scary message, like "Your IP has been logged, if you come on here again we will report you to the Gas Police".