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IP.Board 3.1.1 Dev Update: Search Engine Optimisation Enhancements
As many of you will know, search engine optimisation is a process of ongoing improvement. We made some big steps towards making IP.Board more search-friendly when we released 3.0 and we’ve vastly improved on that with the release of 3.1. We've also started to pay attention to SEO details in our other applications.
However, you had feedback for us as soon as we released and we've done our best to accomodate some of the things you've suggested for IP.Board 3.1.1. Here's what we've changed:
404 Errors for Non-Existent Pages
Previously, if someone made a typo when linking to your site (for example, http://myforums.com/l instead of http://myforums.com/), or even deliberately added random characters to the end of your address, IP.Board would happily respond with a "200 OK" response.
What this meant is that when Google (or any other search engine) followed that link, IP.Board was saying "Yep, that's a page that exists." and so the search engine would index that page along side your actual forums link. When doing so, the search engines would also recognise that as being duplicate content, and there was a chance that your site's rankings may suffer as a result.
Now, those types of links correctly serve a "404 Not Found" error. This tells search engines and web browsers that the page they were trying to access does not exist and should not be indexed.
Bad Canonical URLs
If you've ever looked at the HTML source code generated by IP.Board for your forum index, you might have noticed that the "canonical" meta tag was pointing to http://myforums.com/index, instead of http://myforums.com/. Much like the problem above, this leads to some confusion as to whether the home page for your forums is at "/", or "/index". We've now changed this to point correctly to the root of your forums, without the additional "index" part.
IP.Content: Title Tags and Keywords in Databases
If you use a custom wrapper in IP.Content, instead of the IP.Board wrapper, you may have noticed that when viewing a record within a database, the title and keywords tags are always set to those of the containing page. We've now fixed this so that the title tag correctly contains the title of the record instead, and the keywords tag is populated using the article's keywords.
Finally...
We've started to better document how to set up your forum for best performance in search engines, but if you've still got any questions, please feel free to ask me!
Additionally, if there are any tips you'd like to share, please post start a topic in our feedback forums with your ideas. If they are good we will include them in the documentation!
However, you had feedback for us as soon as we released and we've done our best to accomodate some of the things you've suggested for IP.Board 3.1.1. Here's what we've changed:
404 Errors for Non-Existent Pages
Previously, if someone made a typo when linking to your site (for example, http://myforums.com/l instead of http://myforums.com/), or even deliberately added random characters to the end of your address, IP.Board would happily respond with a "200 OK" response.
What this meant is that when Google (or any other search engine) followed that link, IP.Board was saying "Yep, that's a page that exists." and so the search engine would index that page along side your actual forums link. When doing so, the search engines would also recognise that as being duplicate content, and there was a chance that your site's rankings may suffer as a result.
Now, those types of links correctly serve a "404 Not Found" error. This tells search engines and web browsers that the page they were trying to access does not exist and should not be indexed.
Bad Canonical URLs
If you've ever looked at the HTML source code generated by IP.Board for your forum index, you might have noticed that the "canonical" meta tag was pointing to http://myforums.com/index, instead of http://myforums.com/. Much like the problem above, this leads to some confusion as to whether the home page for your forums is at "/", or "/index". We've now changed this to point correctly to the root of your forums, without the additional "index" part.
IP.Content: Title Tags and Keywords in Databases
If you use a custom wrapper in IP.Content, instead of the IP.Board wrapper, you may have noticed that when viewing a record within a database, the title and keywords tags are always set to those of the containing page. We've now fixed this so that the title tag correctly contains the title of the record instead, and the keywords tag is populated using the article's keywords.
Finally...
We've started to better document how to set up your forum for best performance in search engines, but if you've still got any questions, please feel free to ask me!
Additionally, if there are any tips you'd like to share, please post start a topic in our feedback forums with your ideas. If they are good we will include them in the documentation!
