SEO Help Mods for IPB

Alright, I'm finding some SEO mods for IPB and figured I'd share what I found so far.....

SITEMAP: Board Message

SITEMAP: Invision Power Board Sitemap Generator For IP.Board 2.3.x & 3.0.x

SEO: MinervaSEO 2.0.3 for IPB 3.0.2 -> IP.Board v3.0.x Mods -> Modifications -> Downloads

 

Thanks for posting. This ought to help some IPB users. Maybe we can eventually compile a nice Sticky thread of all sorts of recommended IP.Board sites, mods, themes, tips, etc.

 

Arny, I don't know closely you track your SEO results, but when I first started using vBSEO, I became pretty OCD about it. And I wasn't against experimenting with different things on a couple of my smaller sites, so I was getting a lot of data on what worked and what didn't.

When I was agonizing over the decision to stick with vBulletin or not, I started a list of pros and cons. The only two pros I could come up with were vBSEO and my nearly five years experience with vB. When I realized it was either learn vB 4 or learn IPB, those years of experience really didn't mean so much any longer, aye? I had a lot of luck using vBSEO, but that was my only reason for staying with vB and it suddenly wasn't a big enough reason. I figured I would just make the switch and deal with the consequences.

Actually, there have been no negative consequences. My IPB pages are getting indexed every bit as quickly as vBSEO pages were. And I'm still getting hammered with spiders, moreso than ever before.

I've added a hook for meta tags and description on the index page and I've edited a template to remove the forum name from topic titles. That's it. I looked into both Minerva and Community SEO, but the reviews of both are pretty lacklustre at best. And with the results I'm already seeing, I question the need for either. I suspect if Crawlability were to release and IPB script, I would purchase a license to see how it goes, but I'm starting to think IPB is pretty well optimized, straight out of the box. There are a couple of URL issues Invision are working on cleaning up and I don't know that much more needs to be done.

Keep some close records for a bit and see what your results are like. I'm interested to see how others are faring with their IPB optimization efforts.

 

I started this thread on how to SEO our IPB forums, I've picked up a few tips.

 

Brandon, I had seen that thread before and added the custom meta hook as well as the robot.txt file adjustment here: Board Message

I was thinking of doing the adjustment here: Remove Board Name/Title

But was wondering if removing the title of the forum would hurt it at all with duplicate keywords by Google. Any particular reason other than wanting to have each thread shared with a distinct title?

I remember that we did chat about that briefly over IM the other day, but couldn't remember what we discussed

 

OK, I went out on a lark and purchased a CSEO license. I figured nothing ventured nothing gained, right?

Let me give you a quick customer review.

If you visit the CSEO site, you will note many of the forums are protected forums. That is done to keep prospective customers from seeing the complaints. CSEO is one individual. And from what I have gathered, CSEO is a part-time business at the very best. It may even be a hobby that he earns money from, rather than an actual business venture. What I am getting at is the owner is rarely around. If you're used to the service at vBSEO, where there are always staff members around to help, you're not going to care for the CSEO support system.

CSEO requires IonCube, so be prepared.

CSEO requires two PHP file edits. One of them is a bit of a joke, actually. You edit one bit of code and then the instructions say to look for another bit of code containing

private static function _fUrliNIT()
{
// Lots of code here
}

Lots of code here?!? WTF is up with that?

Oh, wait, he says to replace the entire function from about (about, no less!) lines 1160 - 1282. OK, let me close my text editor and open a PHP editor. OK, there's line 1160 and it doesn't look anything like his example. Oh, that's right, he has you add several lines of code in the earlier edit, so now line 1160 is now going to be something like 1180. But get this - How many lines is contained in // Lots of code here???

Since several people have griped about this in the customer forums, I found someone that had sorted exactly which code was contained in // Lots of code here.

Edits all finished and double-checked. Upload the files, rebuild the FURL cache and look at that 404 error on the site. URL doesn't exist. Fuss with .htaccess and nothing works. Dive into configuration pages inside CSEO and nothing works. Disable CSEO's URL rewrites and bada-bing, the forum is back to working again.

Take two fresh PHP files, edit them as instructed and upload them. Start with fresh .htaccess file and upload it. Check configurations within CSEO and everything looks good to go. Enable rewrites and can you imagine, the site is throwing 404 errors again?

Scour customer forums and find two threads, customers having the same issues. The owner's response on the forums? Open a ticket. Any evidence of the problem being resolved on the forums? Not a flippin' chance. Why would we want to help anyone else, when they can open a ticket?

So, I open a ticket after 3.5 hours of failed effort.

Did I mention that was over 14 hours ago?

Back to the customer forums. Oh, yeah, here's a thread where someone is mentioning how slow support tickets are. Yeah, right here it says the owner says he will usually try to get to tickets within a couple days. HEY, he's doing this in his free time and he has a life, so just sit down and shut up. He'll get to it when he gets to it.

Screw me to tears.

If you're interested in an SEO add-on for IPB, look into MinervaSEO. It seems the support is pitiful there as well, but at least the script is free. As for myself, I paid $90 for poor support.

There's my life lesson for the day. Thou shalt keep thine own coins in thine own pocket whence thou visits the CSEO site.

 

Thanks for the info Mike.

Even though it sucks that you had to go through what you did, it is definitely appreciated that you shared your experience for others to avoid going down that road.

 

Thanks for the review Mike

Arny, this is the post I think you wanted to link to about removing the site name from post.
I've removed the forum name from the post, and would like to remove them from the categories as well.
I do this because I don't want the same "sitename.com" on all my post, I want each thread to have a unique title..

 

OK, just to complete the IPB SEO experience, I decided to give MinervaSEO a close look.

Two thumbs up.

You can configure URLs however you like and once you have that file edited, the package almost falls into place. There are two PHP files edits, which are clearly indicated. I just grabbed fresh copies of each, made the necessary edits and uploaded them along with the rest of the package. From there, you install an application, roll through some quick settings and you're in business. All the IPB fURLs are 301'ed, so no loss there.

There are 2-3 things I would like to suggest as possible changes, but none of them are deal-breakers. I think they would merely enhance the package. Both the portal and the forum index page get an .html appended to them and I would like to not use that. I'm more of a virtual folder kind of guy, myself. You can push the topic title into the breadcrumb (which IPB overlooks) and I would like to see that become an h1 or h2. Other than that, I'm well pleased to this point. Now let's see what the package can really do.

 

I'll have to check it out

will it work with ip.content? I'm thinking about using that for my cms.

 

IP.Content already has a good URL structure. You name the page and the structure ends up as /page/yourname.

CSEO doesn't work with IP.Content, BTW.

 

The free one also does not currently work with the blogs. I think the author will be fixing it up though.

 

Thanks for that review Mike, I was actually thinking of getting that, glad I didn't!!!

 

If you've not posted in that thread on his site, please do so. Mine seems to be the lone voice, looking for integration of the blogs.

 

Well, I'm sorry to report this, but MinervaSEO clashes with IP.Gallery 3.1.0 RC 1.

I installed the Gallery a little over a week ago and it's been driving me batty since. (Well, battier than usual) Today I finally tried disabling MinervaSEO and voila, the Gallery works a champ.

I hope he'll get the script updated to work with the latest IPB releases, because it seems to work well enough. But with the Gallery on one site and the Blogs on another, I can't use it as much as I would like. <sigh>

 

Thanks for the ongoing updates on this Mike. Hopefully things get worked out soon

 

I'm not holding much hope. He says he just can't get motivated to work on the project any longer. <shrug>

I'll just keep my fingers crossed that Crawlability will decide to get involved and produce a script for IPB.

 

So, when I go to MyAps > IPB SEO it say it's not enabled. But, if I look in the settings for it it says it is. Am I missing something? I followed the instructions. I don't have a .htaccess file, si that required?

 

May be FURL is not enabled? it's the second setting.

you need .htaccess if you :
1- have apache ( or litespeed) to have mod_rewrite
2- want to remove index.php? from your url

 

.....Litespeed. Let's take a gander then. See if this works. I don't normally do SEO friendly things as I've never had issues getting ranked for good keywords for my forum, but, the default links are horrible on IPB lol.