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Post SEO's Are They Worth The Hype? 
 
I've been working on something that's giving me problems with SEO turned on - So I went looking for answers.  

It appears that programming professionals who create and sell this stuff on the basis that it speeds up things and is better for search-optimisation - are literally talking rubbish.

It appears that Google and others would prefer if one didn't stuff around with url's as it confuses the search engines.

And if I remember rightly, Yros had problems with web-users being re--directed to the lofi theme when SEO is turned on. So what else is really happening?  

Anyway - Here's a good read.


Quote:
Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That's our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems.


http://googlewebmastercentral.blogs...tatic-urls.html

And afterwards - try to convince me that SEO is actually beneficial, or a complete waste of time.  

Edit:

I've been looking around at some Icy Phoenix websites, and it appears that no one is using SEO - not even here?

Why?  
 



 
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Post Re: SEO's Are They Worth The Hype? 
 
Maybe because of resource usage?
 




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Post Re: SEO's Are They Worth The Hype? 
 
Hehe! Then what's the point of it?

I've just looked at a site (That's been up for six months) where SEO works ok locally, but when I Google the site - No short url's are seen anywhere. And as a matter of fact, the main point of what he is trying to get out there doesn't appear at all.

Maybe Goofle has a point.  
 



 
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Post Re: SEO's Are They Worth The Hype? 
 
mort wrote: [View Post]
It appears that Google and others would prefer if one didn't stuff around with url's as it confuses the search engines.

This sentence says it all...

If "you" (generally speaking) are not able to avoid duplicated content, then it is better to stay away from such techniques.

My personal experience is that you don't need a static URL to be indexed... sometimes this kind of URL may be friendly to humans, in the sense that could be easily remembered and recalled, but for search engines it's a different story.

I worked a lot about this matter in the past, and in Icy Phoenix 2.0 I should have resolved most of the issues in respect of the old versions, since I have added a "canonical" url to header which should be used by all search engine to index content instead of relying of the address typed in the address bar.

It's very tough to deal with some mods though... for example if you enable some special blocks or CMS pages to show your content in a different way (kb views, posts blocks, news pages, etc...) then you may get in trouble with SEO. It's not easy to deal with all possible cases and combinations, so each webmaster should act accordingly.

Not all SEO companies are "talking rubbish"... but many of them.

The best SEO strategy is paying Goofle through advertising programs... you'll be on top for a while... then you need your content to stay there.

Very few free lunches in SEO strategies right now...
 




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Post Re: SEO's Are They Worth The Hype? 
 
Mighty Gorgon wrote: [View Post]
Very few free lunches in SEO strategies right now...


Yeah! I wonder how much it would cost to strip this to a short url - I imagine it would be a nightmare for preg_replace.  

Code: [Download] [Hide] [Select]
<a href=\''.$playlink.'\' title="'.$row['name'].'&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;img src=\''.$row['thumburl'].'\' width=\'150\' height=\'110\' alt=\'\' /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;'.$row['description'].'"><img class="small-radius" src=\''.THUMBS.'/'.$row['thumb'].'\' width=\'45\' height=\'45\' alt=\'\' />'';


But it needs to be coded like that for a "Tool-Tip" on mouseover  
 



 
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Post Re: SEO's Are They Worth The Hype? 
 
Because this is got as a URL?

Maybe I don't get it.
 




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Post Re: SEO's Are They Worth The Hype? 
 
Mighty Gorgon wrote: [View Post]
Maybe I don't get it.


I have the same problem!  

That url script does four things.

 untitled1

Yep, it's not phpBB or icy etc, it's something I've been working on and have thought about putting it here in the php scripts thingy.

This is a html demo - - - http://members.iinet.net.au/~cranky65/arcade.html

 
 



 
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Post Re: SEO's Are They Worth The Hype? 
 
Now I understand what do you mean.

Have a look at includes/functions_rewrite.php, I dealt with something similar in the past.

It's not easy though... it took me a couple of days to figure out how to write properly those RegExp... and I'm sure they are not covering all the possibilities.

In particular have a look at this portion of code:
Code: [Download] [Hide] [Select]
        'vt1' => '/(?<!\/)' . CMS_PAGE_VIEWTOPIC . '\?' . POST_FORUM_URL . '=([0-9]+)((&amp;)|(&))' . POST_TOPIC_URL . '=([0-9]+)((&amp;)|(&))' . POST_POST_URL . '=([0-9]+)((&amp;)|(&)){0,1}(.*?)title=\"(.*?)(["]+>){1}([^>]+>)(.*?)<\/a>/',

 




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Post Re: SEO's Are They Worth The Hype? 
 
Thanks Luca,

Now some things are starting to fall into place.
 



 
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Post Re: SEO's Are They Worth The Hype? 
 
It's all about finding ways to get your website to show up as high on a search as possible. Especially if someone does a specific search. If your blog was about any certain theme, you'd want anyone who searched for anything about your theme to have your site show up. Higher on the list the better.
 



 
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Post Re: SEO's Are They Worth The Hype? 
 
charlesdevon wrote: [View Post]
Especially if someone does a specific search. If your blog was about any certain theme.


If this is confusing - So am I.  

Thanks, but blogs aside, there appears to many points of view about what a short url is supposed to end up looking like.

One concept is to just take out as much as possible from the string with preg for bots, and reprocess it when a query comes in from a browser.

The other is that the url string should process .php to end it with .html - by modifying .htaccess with RewriteRule's etc.

For example I'm sure I read that phpBB3 doesn't need to modify their url's with SEO because they end in .html ?

Then one reads that "Well constructed meta-data" is one of the best ways to attract more visitors through search engines. And I tend to agree, because there were some really good examples and arguments for doing it in a particular way.

Most sites use static metadata that has limitations on length etc. but if one was to use dynamic metadata (either manually entered or pulled via SQL) as well, then the metadata in the index.* would be different for every page.

So in reality, one could then end up throwing a whole Dictionary-Plus of descriptions and keywords at the search engines - all leading back to one's site etc.

Don't know - Think I'll leave it alone for now.
 



 
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Post Re: SEO's Are They Worth The Hype? 
 
phpBB 3 doesn't have HTML extension to its pages.

They have only replaced TPL extension to HTML which it's just cosmetic... and may prove only marginally useful to those used to open TPLs with other softwares...

All phpBB 3 pages still have PHP extensions with parameters... just head to phpbb.com and check it.

I think that only folders hierarchies for forums could really help both bots and humans in SEO (Example: ip.com/forum/off_topics/viewtopic.php?p=x)... all the rest should be dynamic metadata.
 




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Post Re: SEO's Are They Worth The Hype? 
 
That's one of the problems with phpBB.com, one ends up reading something that the Author has no idea of what he's on about.

But I thought that this was an excellent tutorial. I didn't read it all because it goes on and on.  

And I think that the main gist of it is that while page rankings could be manipulated previously, it's pretty useless to rely on SEO links to do anything much at all these days.

For example - IP.com has a rating of 6/10 and IP.it has 5/10 - And as the tutorial states, I would be better off If I could get my URL onto more established, long term and trusted sites that don't have a useless ranking, other than relying on just "decorated" URL's.

Links on well frequented/known sites -  Dynamic titles, meta-data and keywords - and a site-map, seems to be the way go. ?

http://www.tizag.com/SEOTutorial/

Edit:

I actually find this subject interesting because it's like religion - Everyone to their own opinion.  

And it gives the Bots something new.  

But when I'm not logged in here, I usually go to "Who's On Line" to see what or if anything new is happening, and the place is always crawling with Bots.

And you don't use SEO?  

I mean, if you Google this "iPhone/iPod/iPad based on Icy Phoenix" it's apparent that Google has no problems with the long url format that Icy is using - So why would anyone even want to change it?
 



 
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Post Re: SEO's Are They Worth The Hype? 
 
mort wrote: [View Post]
I actually find this subject interesting because it's like religion - Everyone to their own opinion.  

Exactly...

The problem is that Google is setting the rules for SEO, and Google is constantly changing these rules to improve their services to final users... and honestly I think they are doing pretty well their job.

If the rules are changing often, this means that techniques that used to work well in the past may not work anymore... and if people are not reading what Google regularly posts about this topic... they are not going to improve their rank.

What I can tell from my experience is that the only consistent and reliable element to improve rank is having a good specific content within the website... removing spam and "copied" content as much as one can.

Most of the rest is cosmetic, decoration, beauty, or just call it how do you like it.

I can tell that I worked a lot on this topic... and Icy Phoenix has a pretty solid SEO for forum content. What is still missing is a solid "News" section "WordPress" like. If I ever have enough time, I'll rewrite that part from scratch to improve the way content is served to bots.

URL rewriting is just a small part of SEO and you really don't need that... it may help, but without solid content it's not going to improve anything for you.

Finally... SEO requires time... do not pretend to rank higher if your website is only few months old.
 




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Post Re: SEO's Are They Worth The Hype? 
 
Mighty Gorgon wrote: [View Post]
Icy Phoenix has a pretty solid SEO for forum content.


And put together by someone who actually knows what he's doing.  

I've been watching a site for some time that has been established well over 12 months and uses a home-brand SEO and Google has never got past the index - - - - I wont go into the details, it's pointless. But as you pointed out, if you don't maintain it and keep it up to date - It's pretty much useless.

Quote:
URL rewriting is just a small part of SEO and you really don't need that... it may help, but without solid content it's not going to improve anything for you.

Finally... SEO requires time... do not pretend to rank higher if your website is only few months old.


Well, I think that you have answered about all there is, or I wanted to know on this subject, and it's cleared the way for what I'm going to do next.

 band
 



 
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