Do we want SEO?

[plexus]

I'd like this site to be SEO compliant. google does not pick up any posts off the site because the URLs are not "descriptive" which is a requirement by google SEO. to do this and in general make the forum SEO compliant so that it gets picked up by search engines will require some re-tooling of the scripts under the hood. I can do basic phpBB mods. I read through one of the better more common SEO mod directions and there is a lot there - there are many risks. any wrong move can kill the forum. although the database will remain intact it could take a bunch of time to rebuild the forum. I don't want to take the risk doing it myself. Nor do I want one of the registered members here to do it because if you mess it up, its dead. I won't bother to fix it, frankly.

I'd rather pay someone to do this. would you be willing to contribute to getting SEO on the site if it costs money? i think I can get a phpBB guru to do it for under $100. let me know what you think. if enough people are willing to contribute I'll move forward with it. just respond to the poll on this post.

I will run the poll for 2 weeks from now. don't tally up the votes and decide based on what the total is here because its not real money. just answer based on your feelings about it if we move forward with this.

Answering the poll is not a commitment. I just want to get a sense if there is enough member backing to make it happen.

[scantrontb]

one question: is that a one-time cost, or a monthly fee? I'd assume (and hope) it would be a one time conversion cost and we'd be done with it, but gotta ask to be sure...

[eddiema]

[plexus]

[CL1]

May want to start with explaining to those of us who have no clue what SEO means? Search Engine Optimised, maybe?? Just guessing, based on the thread posts.

CL1

[knobunc]

I _really_ don't think that is the problem. Yes I want google to scrape the site. But before we do that, I want to make sure that the boards show up.

Google happily scrapes other sites without "descriptive URLs". The only thing is that the google page rank prefers things with descriptive URLs, but that's not why we are being skipped.

[plexus]

SEO = search engine optimization. at the moment the post content of the forum is not available in google. google can not see the posts. my understanding this was because regular phpBB URLs do not make the google spider happy. but i am led to believe that its a permissions issue. so i am working with knobunc on that. if its just a matter of giving the google bot the right perms to get the content into google search, we should try that first and see how well the forum posts show up in a search. if they are buried then we can talk about SEO which would help to get the content further up the search results.

[CL1]

Thank you for the explanation, Plexus

CL1

[lwalkera]

Just saw the Things forum show up on my Google alert for Printrbot

[plexus]

so google is now crawling the forum but so far it only seems to be getting the forum titles, none of the posts. i think this is where SEO comes into play. also i dont understand why when you search printrbottalk it shows all these stats sites. i wonder if this is something to do with the code that google makes you put in for analytics to work. other sites are grabbing that too and trying to make an ecommerce play on it. sigh.

[PxT]

Google seems to be crawling the forums:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:pri ... com/forum/
There are a bunch of results there that lead to individual threads.

You can to Google in order to give them better hints about what to index. There is a plugin available for phpBB that makes it easier to generate the Sitemap file. IMO, spending money on any type of "SEO" is pretty much wasted money. This stuff about "descriptive URLs" is something dreamed up by the SEO guys in order to get money. It's not a google requirement. It may help (or just as likely, may not) but it's not some magic fix.


Another big factor in your google page rank is based on how many external sites link in to this one. There don't seem to be (m)any:
http://www.google.com/search?q=link:printrbottalk.com
Not much you can do about that except encourage people to post/blog on their own site/facebook/twitter/etc. about good/useful threads that are found here. As long as it's not some kind of SPAMmy promotion then any incoming links will serve as a hint to google that there is content here that needs to be indexed.

[holmes4]

I agree with PxT - spending money is pointless. Page titles already include the title of the forum or thread -nothing more is needed. If you wanted to help SEO a bit, you could find a PHPbb add-on that included the thread/forum title in the URL. I know that does help.

Initially, you had something preventing search engine spiders from seeing threads and posts. I gather that is fixed now, so you should start showing up in indexes.

[plexus]

OK it looks like google is snarfing up the posts now. whew. that's all I wanted. thanks to knobunc for helping fix this.

[Mooselake]

Still willing to chuck in a few bucks. Looks like you need a new computer after the Coke incident - anybody here want to help out with that in exchange for all the time Plexus has put into this forum, if he promises to never put his soft (or hard) drinks in the same saddlebag?

Kirk

[mdfast1]

I would rather donate for plexus than SEO.

[plexus]

no no please no donations. thanks very much for the offer! at the moment lets just keep money out of it.

[plexus]

[knobunc]

Sweet!

Of course the spam is now picking up since we have better visibility. *sigh*.

[plexus]

[victoriaheden]

Great stuff.... (deleted web address) is another resource for cost effective seo services. I surfed the web and found this site on web, so use it, it might be interesting to you.

Mod note: thanks for the link. it has been removed and kept for later use. we want to avoid possible spam on the site so posting links to non-3D printing related things is suspicious. but we will keep the link if we decide to use it later.

[holmes4]

That was another spammer, by the way. They search for threads mentioning their topic and put in a plug for their own service.

[knobunc]

Definitely. Plexus is too nice... first post here, vague subject, has a link to something non bot related? Nuke it!

[mdfast1]

Def. was a spammer.

[Elbot]

I really don't think seo is necessary for your site. I mean, I found you as listed 1st in Google after typing "printrbot forum". I've done seo before for others and I'd say that your site is pretty darn good with regard to seo. I don't see how i can improve that.

Now, about the seo of your webpages, that's a tricky one because it has to be automated because there are too many new pages per day. The problem with automation is that google changes their algorithm periodically. Automation cannot anticipate changes. Therefore, it would have to be not a one time fee of $100 but a continuous "maintenance" where you pay a guy $100 every month.

A good cheap way to get your pages listed on google but not necessariy seo, is just have an automation script turn all your active server pages into html pages linked from your index page. At least all your most recent and/or most popular pages. That wouldn't be seo, but would at least be listing on se. A very simple script available for download and/or purchase should suffice for that. I don't think it's necessary, but if you really think you need it, seeing how you've answered our questions and I've even seen you mail a missing piece of a printrbot to a forum member when Brook ignored him, I'll spot you $5 so that 20 forum members each spotting $5 should total your needed $100 USD (I know you're a Canuck so I don't know if you're referring to USD or CAN D). Just let me know what you need and I'll help out.

[knobunc]

The SEO problem has been resolved. The forum code makes a special user for the search bots, and by default they did not have permission to see the forums. Once that was resolved the site shot up in the google rankings.

[halley]

[marmil]

[thawkins]

[kuntalghosh]

[RetireeJay]