System: Search Engine Optimization
Submitted
Charles
, Sep 24 2009 12:44 PM | Last updated Oct 10 2012 08:44 AM
Admin CP --> System --> System Settings --> Search Engine Optimization.
This page controls settings related to how search engines view and index the content on your community.
Search Engine Visits
Search engine spiders are the programs that search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc.) use to index the content of your community into their search engine databases.
You can define how IP.Board interacts with search engines. By enabling search engine spider recognition IP.Board will try to recognize when a visitor is actually a search engine and behave according to the settings on this page.
You can choose to log spider visits and view them in the Logs section of the Admin CP which is useful to see the progress that search engines are making indexing your community. IPS does suggest you turn on log pruning to ensure that your database size does not grow to unmanageable levels with logs.
By choosing a group to treat a search engine spider as you can manage the type of content the search engine spider can see. You can choose to have the system treat the spider as a Guest so it can only read publicly viewable posts or as a member so it can see what your normal members can see.
By forcing a spider to use a specific skin you can create a simple, search engine optimized skin that is only shown to search engines to make your community easier to index.
You can also choose to have IP.Board show the search engines as an active user on your community so you, and your members, can see that a spider is currently indexing your site. If you do not want your members to see this option, choose the show anonymous option.
Ping Services
Here, you can configure certain sites to notify of new topics posted to your forums. A few defaults are included, and you can add additional services if you wish. Be careful adding too many, otherwise posting new content may be slow on your forum as the software attempts to ping all of the external sites.
Friendly URL Features
These settings control how Friendly URLs are used.
For more information about Friendly URLs, see this tutorial.
Board Index
These settings allow you to configure the title and meta tags used on the board index.
Look and Feel
You can configure a specific skin for guests to use, allowing you to optimize the guest experience (which bots will typically also make use of) in order to remove clutter or otherwise improve the guest experience by specifying a skin that only guests see.
This page controls settings related to how search engines view and index the content on your community.
Search Engine Visits
Search engine spiders are the programs that search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc.) use to index the content of your community into their search engine databases.
You can define how IP.Board interacts with search engines. By enabling search engine spider recognition IP.Board will try to recognize when a visitor is actually a search engine and behave according to the settings on this page.
You can choose to log spider visits and view them in the Logs section of the Admin CP which is useful to see the progress that search engines are making indexing your community. IPS does suggest you turn on log pruning to ensure that your database size does not grow to unmanageable levels with logs.
By choosing a group to treat a search engine spider as you can manage the type of content the search engine spider can see. You can choose to have the system treat the spider as a Guest so it can only read publicly viewable posts or as a member so it can see what your normal members can see.
Be careful when choosing a group as you may give the search engine access to private areas of your community. Do not give the search engine more permissions that you would want the entire world to see.
By forcing a spider to use a specific skin you can create a simple, search engine optimized skin that is only shown to search engines to make your community easier to index.
You can also choose to have IP.Board show the search engines as an active user on your community so you, and your members, can see that a spider is currently indexing your site. If you do not want your members to see this option, choose the show anonymous option.
Ping Services
Here, you can configure certain sites to notify of new topics posted to your forums. A few defaults are included, and you can add additional services if you wish. Be careful adding too many, otherwise posting new content may be slow on your forum as the software attempts to ping all of the external sites.
Friendly URL Features
These settings control how Friendly URLs are used.
For more information about Friendly URLs, see this tutorial.
- Redirect to new friendly URL format?: The old showtopic=##, showuser=##, etc. style links will be redirected to the new friendly urls.
- URL Type: This setting only matters if you are not using .htaccess to rewrite the URLs. "Path Info" will make the friendly urls utilize "/index.php/" in them like so:
[url="http://yoursite.com/forums/index.php/topics/123-topic"]http://yoursite.com/forums/index.php/topics/123-topic[/url]
"Query string" will utilize "/index.php?/" in them like so
[url="http://yoursite.com/forums/index.php?/topics/123-topic"]http://yoursite.com/forums/index.php?/topics/123-topic[/url]
This is a minor detail of course, but some servers are only able to read the query string method above, so if "path info" does not work for you, try "query string" instead. Of course, as stated previously, if you are using .htaccess url rewriting, this setting is irrelevant. - Use .htaccess mod_rewrite: This will remove the "index.php/" from the URL entirely so that the URL looks like so
[url="http://yoursite.com/forums/topics/123-topic"]http://yoursite.com/forums/topics/123-topic[/url]
You must be using a server that has Apache installed with the mod_rewrite module, and you must upload a .htaccess file to your forum directory with the code provided in the setting description (this code is generated dynamically based on your configured url). If you are using another server environment that has native url-rewriting capabilities, you <i>can</i> enable this setting so long as you add a configuration file that tells your server to route all requests for files/folders that do not exist through index.php for processing. It is up to you to create the necessary configurations for other server environments such lighttpd or nginx, however.
Board Index
These settings allow you to configure the title and meta tags used on the board index.
Look and Feel
You can configure a specific skin for guests to use, allowing you to optimize the guest experience (which bots will typically also make use of) in order to remove clutter or otherwise improve the guest experience by specifying a skin that only guests see.
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