As someone in the market, here's my initial impressions on CommunitySEO.

What I like about it:

• Nice looking URLs. Ability to remove duplicate and stop words.
• Seems most URLs have been converted (see below)
• Redirects old links (index.php?showtopic=) to FURLs.
• Similar topics is nice, I agree it's a useful SEO feature.
• Sitemap generator, very nice (support for more than 50K topics?)
• It's available now.

What I don't like:

• Spider Skin (cloaking?)
• Some of the URLs are not very friendly, ...html&view=new, ...lofiversion/index.php?f1.html
• If you click on a post number while viewing a topic, it's not converted:
• ...index.php?s=&showtopic=XXXX&view=findpost&p=XXXXX, html&pid=XXXX&st=XXX&#entryXXXX
• Topic IDs in RSS feeds are not rewritten.
• Not all special characters are stripped: 24and9835King-Siddand9834and9829and9830-m2371.html
• Golbal/per forum meta tags. IMO, they need to be dynamic. The description should pull the first 200-255 characters from the post content, and the keywords be a comination of the title, broken apart with commas, and a few per forum globals.

Questions:

• Looks like it can, but just confirming, the ability to modify the FURL? i.e. Use underscores instead of dashes?
• Does your mod_rewrite break .htaccess redirects?
• From above, does the sitemap generator support more than 50,000 topics?
• Is it possible to permalink to an individual post?
  (index.php?s=&showtopic=XXXX&view=findpost&p=XXX XX, html&pid=XXXX&st=XXX&#entryXXXX)
• Is there an option for copyright removal?
• Any success stories?
• Why don't you use it on your own forums?

Thanks.



You can turn it off, but in our experience offering an alternative skin is not cloaking - you are not hiding/changing content, just display, which is acceptable.




While this is true in some areas, it's all but impossible to convert *every* potential url with query string parameter that can be offerred by IPB. Adding &view=new actually does change the the function of the URL - however it could load content that is the same as if you didn't add it (or if you added &st=10, or &view=getlastpost, etc.). As such, to generate an actual static url for a function like this is more dangerous than not. Spiders recognize query string parameters typically change functions of the url, so they will realize the page is the same, but may be slightly different due to this parameter - whereas if you have two different urls pointing to the same page, it is considered duplicate content.

In other words, you have to walk a fine line in determining what all you change.



On the spider skin it is not a link, it's static in the post. Because that particular url is generated by javascript in IPB, we can't "fix" it without actually modifying javascript files - and if we are going to do one, we'll need to do them all...it was seen as a low pay-off when the Spider skin already transforms the url that is displayed.



Good catch, although to fix these as well, it will require (yet another) file edit. I personally can't wait to see if IPB might include some sort of api support in the future to minimize the file edits needed for this sort of modification.



This could be true (depending on the character set used, etc. and so on) *however* special characters in the range of entities you are pointing out are generally not used in titles often, and we do actually remove the special characters themselves. You can setup a custom transliteration file to convert specific ones you are noticing posted on your site if you wanted.



We are looking into ways to better handle meta tags, including the option of per-topic meta topics. You can presently set it to be the same as the page title, if you wanted:

http://communityseo.com/forums/o-I-make-my...-title-t86.html

Not every page has post content (the IPB homepage for example), so we can't always pull the first 200 characters of the post content, though as I said we're looking into enhancing the topic page titles and will consider your suggestions when we do that.

RE: http://communityseo.com/forums/o-I-make-my...-title-t86.html


Here's an example of some competitors links. I can't find where they use any query strings (granted, it's for a different forum script):
I'm guessing you recommend all lo-fi content be blocked?


In my opinion the description tag is very important to high SERP, and I should be a high priority.

How much is copyright removal?

I just noticed you nofollow external links, but not internal. Is that part of this script? Any other nofollow options (reply, new topic, search, etc)?

Sorry, one more question. Any problems merging topics/posts with this mod?

FYI, a nice article about static URLs like this product enables.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/no-fear...your-site/4578/

Yes, but that doesn't change my previous statement.

The view=getlastpost, view=getnewpost, and st=0 could all in theory point to the exact same page. Do we agree on that? If so, then we should be able to agree that if we rewrote urls such as

topic-t1-getnewpost.html
topic-t1-getlastpost.html
topic-t1-page1.html
topic-t1.html

This is creating 4 separate pages that point to the exact same content. Now, having

topic-t1.html
topic-t1.html&st=0
topic-t1.html&view=getlastpost
topic-t1.html&view=getnewpost

Does add query string arguments, but (1) Most search engines can index them these days anyways, and (2) For those that can't, they still get to the right topic. These arguments may or may not point to the same place - thus we can't remove them entirely (or we remove functionality from your forum software, and that's never a good thing).

I think what we can look at doing is minimizing the use of these on the spider skin however. For the most part, most users won't use the spider skin anyways, so we can remove some of these extra arguments there to limit the number of urls with query string arguments. Unfortunately, however, I would not expect to remove ALL query strings in a highly dynamic application that was never designed to be rewritten such as this one.



It is up to you. With our product you can either

1) Specify it as an "alternative" and let spiders index it (acceptable, because you are telling spiders it's an alternative version of the site)



2) Add nofollow attribute to the lofi links, and then add noindex/nocache headers to the lofi pages to request they don't index it. Further, you can manually add a Disallow line for the lofi content in your robots.txt.

Really, it is up to you.

We do, however, recommend disallowing spiders to index the Printable topic views - having three views for the same content is pushing it. This is also an option with our software.



I would tend to disagree. Any real SEO information you find these details will CLEARLY state that the meta tags do next to nothing. At most, the description tag gives a description for your site in the search engine result listings. It does NOT help (or hurt) your site any in terms of being indexed.

http://www.highrankings.com/metadescription.htm
http://www.searchenginelowdown.com/2006/11...worthwhile.html


Of course there are many more - and, there are almost as many stating that they are still used to an extent.

In my views and experiences, the meta description tag is used to provide a description of the page, but in general not to weight how relevant the page is to a search result, because they were so highly abused. This, of course, does NOT mean they should be ignored or left out by any means. We provide a means to add per-forum meta keyword and description tags (which is of course not available in IPB by default), to use global keyword, description tags (better than nothing), or to automatically put the page title in the keyword/description tags - this we recommend the most, as we have seen the best results when the title, keywords, and description tags all match.

Still, as stated previously, we intend to look into expanding upon the meta tags in a future release, simply because so many people put so much faith in them.




Copyright removal is $100, perpetually (regardless of your license status - i.e. if you purchased a 6 month license, didn't renew for 6 months, then repurchased, your copyright removal would still apply).




Yes, and yes.

You can add nofollow attribute to external links, and you can also force external links through an internal redirect page (which, in turn, also adds the ability for your to LOG externally clicked links). Additionally, you can add nofollow attribute to lofi page link and printable topic pages. You can add the noindex/nocache tags to error pages, or 301 redirect bots (only) from error pages to a page of your choice (such as the index page).

I will be posting a screenshot of some of the settings shortly so others can see them.




There are no issues merging topics - why would there be?

I really would like to purchase a couple copies of your product, and hopefully will do so soon. However, it's for a couple of large, successful sites, and you do have a mostly unproven product. I'm sure you think I'm a royal PITA, but I am just trying to address a few issues that I've noticed so that I feel comfortable moving forward.


I think you've just proven my point. Isn't the whole point of this modification to remove dynamic URLs, and make the site more indexable? Your examples still creates 4 separate indexed URLs that point to the exact same content. Duplicate content issues.

The biggest weakness I see other then duplicate content, is the topic and forum pagnation links. Why do search engines like the lo-fi version so well? I think one reason is the static pagnation URLs. Let's look at what another author has done (this example for forum view). They have lost some of the get new post functionality (in the forum index view).

(equals page three)

What does your page three link look like?

That doesn't appear to be static content. Which do you think will get indexed better, and more often?

Description meta tags can affect the "snipet" that search engines display with the results. Which affects click-through. We could have a link war stating opposite sides of the argument about whether they affect SERP, but one thing for sure, they don't hurt.


Great option, very fair price. Glad to see it!


It's an issue common to other URL mods.

This post has been edited by justme: Mar 26 2007, 03:29 AM

Duplicate URL issues...

The URL of this topic: http://communityseo.com/forums/Initial-Imp...tions-t472.html


Other URLs that resolve to the same page:
& st=0: http://communityseo.com/forums/Initial-Imp...2.html&st=0


Search HL (highlight results): http://communityseo.com/forums/Initial-Imp...ial+impressions


Post ID: http://communityseo.com/forums/Initial-Imp...;p=732#entry732


&view="anything resolves": http://communityseo.com/forums/Initial-Imp...;view=jibberish


&mode=linearplus: http://communityseo.com/forums/Initial-Imp...mode=linearplus


&mode=threaded: http://communityseo.com/forums/Initial-Imp...p;mode=threaded


Blank page?
http://communityseo.com/forums/SEO-Pre-Sal....html&st=15


This post has been edited by justme: Mar 26 2007, 12:02 PM

Yes, nowhere does anything state *all* dynamic urls will totally be wiped off the face of the earth in the Invision product. It's just not possible while retaining functionality.

The issue, I don't think, is duplicate content - because you are talking about query string arguments. Google knows query string arguments are there to affect how a page gets generated, not necessary to change the page that is generated.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be nice to trim them down, sure...however I don't think it is realistic to expect that in a dynamic application such as Invision that it is possible to get rid of all dynamic urls 100%.

It is a problem. I think you'll find all of the examples above in Google's index for this site. Duplicate content should be eliminated with an SEO product like this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acomm...2006-28,GGGL:en


It has been done with another dynamic forum application.