LegallyHigh 0 Report post Posted April 23, 2008 I do not know too much about Forums (or Bulletin Boards) and Forum Programming (I am having trouble learning PHP with My Simple Machines Forum). I was just wondering what is the most SEO Friendly, or most easily Spidered Forum Program. Also, what is the Most Seo Firendly Free Forum Program, and which Forum has the furthest Potential to become the Most Seo Friendly Forum Program (with additions of Mods, of course)? Sorry if this is a lot of Questions in one Thread, I;m just wondering. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Senor_Grunt 0 Report post Posted April 23, 2008 What do you mean by, 'SEO' friendly? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Jezstarr 0 Report post Posted September 29, 2008 (edited) I think they mean Search Engine Optimized so when you are looking at it the urls are clean not with codes and dates etc.And to answer your question no i do not know of many. Edited September 29, 2008 by Jezstarr (see edit history) Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
TheDisturbedOne 1 Report post Posted October 30, 2008 I think that vBulletin is actually the best. They have a bunch of MODs that help SEO and practically invite spiders to index your website. For free forum software, I think SMF is the best. Mine was indexed easily and fast, but Google hasn't put it in searches yet. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
toby 0 Report post Posted October 31, 2008 SMF for what the users see, IBP has a lofi version which is what Google sees, caches and uses in search results.You can't really invite spiders.. if your foruim is linked to by a page that Google knows of, that's all you need, eg your sig.As well as what the forum looks like, eg no javascript content, xhtml, etc, SMF and probably an IBP plugin used here, makes search friendly urls. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
TheDisturbedOne 1 Report post Posted October 31, 2008 SMF has a lo fi version that google can index too. It is a MOD, but it didn't work correct with my forum, so I couldn't use it. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Quatrux 4 Report post Posted November 1, 2008 Try spoofing yourself as a google bot or any other bot and browse different forums and you'll see what you get, by spoofing yourself I mean use a different user agent, the one google is using. As I know it can be done in a lot of ways, the most easiest I guess is using a Firefox add-on which can change your user agent and just use lets say this user agent: Google-bot/2.1 (+https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182072) or even this: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182072) You can find more user agents for all the other bots on google or any other search engine. To tell the truth, I always thought that showing different content to bots than to users was forbidden and your site could get a ban, but I guess what matters is content and not HTML, but also a lot of those forums changes anchor links to be SEO friendly, why can't it always use them :? Anyway, have fun, I believe there are even sites which you can browse with a different user agent online like through a proxy.. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Jezstarr 0 Report post Posted November 1, 2008 Well probably vBulletin forums are most likely to be seo friendly by themselves but of course there are many other ways to make you forum an actual 'SEO' site. The only one i know is vBSEO which is pretty damn good but of course you need to pay for it. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
iGuest 3 Report post Posted February 10, 2009 I will post back here when AEF 1.09 is released some time this month.http://anelectron.com/ Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
