23 replies to this topic

[devaka]

Hello, dear support team!

I've registered here to ask one question about new canonical tag.
Recentrly (Feb. 12) Google, Yahoo and MSN announced a new html tag for removing duplicate content from search engines.
You can read about it on Google Webmaster Blog, Yahoo blog and also on Microsoft website.

The usage of canonical tag:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish" />

Now, why I told about it...
IPB forum engine is well known duplicate content generator for search engines. You can see it yourself in Google SERP. A lot of duplicate content what make search engines cesspool. It will be very useful if you can update engine in next versions to use this tag on various pages.

I want IPB Forum to be a seo optimized and think all user will maintain me in this topic.

Many thanks!
Sergey Koksharov
+380-97-3388869
http://devaka.ru

[_Diesel_]

+1

[sparc]

isn't the duplicate content a result of lofi in 2.x?

In the next IPB version 3.0 they removed lofi. They will be replacing it with a skin so that the content is not duplicated.

[devaka]

In the next IPB version 3.0 they removed lofi. They will be replacing it with a skin so that the content is not duplicated.

ok.. then it seems what if I'll upgrade ipb then I'll loose some traffic from search engines because some of urls will disappear from serp and may be before people linked me this way.

It will be better if creators will make support of rel=canonical tag so we have a set of advantages:
- no duplicate content and clear search results;
- users from search engines will go to needed page (not print verstion or somthing so);
- all previous parameters of duplicate pages will summarize in canonical url and so will rise it relevance to needed terms;
- and so on, and so on...

Understand, people need this thing. If not in nearest future then a bit later.
Some people already created plugins for WordPress, Drupal and few other CMS.
IPB should hold up as an example!

[Kyanar]

Understand, people need this thing. If not in nearest future then a bit later.
Some people already created plugins for WordPress, Drupal and few other CMS.
IPB should hold up as an example!

No, they don't, and no, it shouldn't - IPB3 does not duplicate content. So this is unnecessary.

[Mert]

ok.. then it seems what if I'll upgrade ipb then I'll loose some traffic from search engines because some of urls will disappear from serp and may be before people linked me this way.

No you won't. Your old URLs will 301 Redirect automatically

[devaka]

No, they don't, and no, it shouldn't - IPB3 does not duplicate content. So this is unnecessary.

sounds great but can I view an example?
if you can give me an forum url for analysis it would be great

[devaka]

No you won't. Your old URLs will 301 Redirect automatically

Mert, sorry, but you haven't understood the issue.

Look at this please (all these urls and many others exists in search engine results):
forums.invisionpower.com
forums.invisionpower.com/index.php
forums.invisionpower.com/index.php?s
...
Results 1 - 10 of about 2,110 from forums.invisionpower.com

feel the difference?

[devaka]

IPB3 does not duplicate content.

Kyanar, returning to your answer... May be IPB3 doesn't dupicate content but users linked to your forum does! (believe me)

[Kyanar]

Kyanar, returning to your answer... May be IPB3 doesn't dupicate content but users linked to your forum does! (believe me)

Doesn't matter. IPB3 301 redirects all old style URLs to the new style friendly URLs.

[devaka]

Doesn't matter. IPB3 301 redirects all old style URLs to the new style friendly URLs.

see my example in two posts before..

[sparc]

why not look at the IPB 3.0 Preview site and see if your issues are still occurring?

google already crawls the preview site too

[devaka]

why not look at the IPB 3.0 Preview site and see if your issues are still occurring?

google already crawls the preview site too

i've disabled filter in se:

1. http://www.google.co...r...22&filter=0
results:
ipb3preview.ipslink.com/topic/3009-printing-out-skins/ - 57k
ipb3preview.ipslink.com/topic/3009-printing-out-skins/page__view__findpost__p__22469 - 57k

2. http://www.google.co...r...22&filter=0
results:
ipb3preview.ipslink.com/forum/ - 37k
ipb3preview.ipslink.com/ - 37k
ipb3preview.ipslink.com/index.php - 38k
ipb3preview.ipslink.com/index - 34k

3. http://www.google.co...r...22&filter=0
ipb3preview.ipslink.com/topic/672/_/view/findpost/p/2712/fromsearch/1
ipb3preview.ipslink.com/topic/672/_/view/findpost/p/3233/fromsearch/1
ipb3preview.ipslink.com/topic/672/_/view/findpost/p/3287/fromsearch/1
ipb3preview.ipslink.com/topic/672/_/view/findpost/p/2373/fromsearch/1
ipb3preview.ipslink.com/topic/672/_/view/findpost/p/2354/fromsearch/1
ipb3preview.ipslink.com/topic/672/_/view/findpost/p/2372/fromsearch/1
ipb3preview.ipslink.com/topic/672/_/view/findpost/p/2355/fromsearch/1
ipb3preview.ipslink.com/topic/672/_/view/findpost/p/2370/fromsearch/1
...

need more examples?

[devaka]

THOUGHTS FOR IPB DEVELOPERS AND SELLERS ABOUT CANONICAL TAG:

- it just a one simple tag what easy to implement in your engine;
- without it you make search engine working hard on your site (and your customer sites who used this ipb engine) and in result we have a lot of duplicates and ineffective work;
- with this tag you'll have more ipb customers (i promise, i'll promoting your great cms too).

thanks in advance for implementing this simple canonical tag in your ipb forum engine!

[Jimi Wikman]

Redirecting URLS may help keeping your content less cluttered and keep your SEO, but the searchengines will still see the different versions and spider them. The 301's may lead them to the correct place eventually, but I doubt it will all the time unless IPB 3 has completely removed sessionID from urls and completely sanitised their URL base.

Should the rewriterules of IPB3 get screwed up, or if the host does not allow mod_rewrite for whatever reason then IPB3 will still show the same ugly URLs again and I can promise you that people will screw this up in so many ways its not even funny

Finally it would make life a whole lot easier if there was a canonical tag that you can tie into when building mods instead of poking your head into mod_rewrite.

If it would be possible to completely remove duplicate content from IPB then people would have done so long ago, but the truth is that you can only do so much before the use of rewrite rules becomes more trouble than beneficial.

So, yes...IPB3 is nice when it comes to avoiding duplicate content as long as the FURL works, but not perfect. Adding a canonical tag just add a second layer of preventing duplicate content in a less complicated way (as opposed to writing a FURL).

For example you can add a canonical tag to the help section to make all linkjuice go to http://ipb3preview.i...amp;module=help instead of each helpfile breaking out as a different section http://ipb3preview.i...a...o=01&HID=10 by simply adding the canonical tag

[teraßyte]

Canonical tags can be useful if used in the correct way

[bfarber]

We've seen the announcements from the search engines and have discussed this. We can't promise anything for IPB3.0 because it's a bit more difficult than just popping the tag in there. We have to dynamically create it, and we have to ensure it's correct of course. For instance, you'd still need the paging parameters supported in the URL (st=20) else the links the search engines get wouldn't point to the correct page.

Still, we're looking at it. We'll consider adding it when we are able to sit and evaluate the best way to do so without breaking functionality.

[Luke]

One thing I'd like to see changed...

When you have something like st=20, it means the starting record is 20. It means you can put any number in there, and when you don't use the proper increments the pagination doesn't work properly (it doesn't know what page you're on, because you aren't on a page). There can be so many variations of the st parameter.... Why not have something like page=1, page=2, page=3, and multiply this number against how many posts per page to get the st value internally?

[Brandon D]

The st var is deeply ingrained within IPB and it's apps. I wouldn't fancy having to change that way it's calculated in each place.

[Luke]

Well I'm sure with the pagination function you could have an option to do one or the other so 3rd party apps would work. But with IPB itself, do you realize the different variations there can be because of it? If you had a page=#, if a page did not exist you could show the appropriate error. It would also make more sense to the person viewing the page.