Hello

I would like to know if something can be done with Fireboard, in order to avoid having duplicate content in search engines.

I explain : I would like to set links as nofollow the following URLs :

- reply links (why crawl the reply or new thread pages ?)
- edition links (idem)
- display mode links (example : "page1.html" is the same as "page1.html?view=flat" AND "page1.html?display=threaded"
- useless links that are not contents and shouldn't be crawled.

Do you think something can be done ?

The philosophy behind this is "Less pages crawled but only content pages (indexes,threads, posts,...) have to be crawled".

What do you think that ?

regards
lolo

Hello,

I am afraid of a so bad SEO forum and no answer to your question since 2 months:

I am a professional webmaster and migrated from phpBB+SEO mod rewrite on october to Fireboard on one of my websites:

Results is 3500 to 5000 unique visitor per day before migration.
And now less than 3000 visitors per day: since november.
I lost almost all my Google incoming traffic on my big forum because Google do not like my new fireboard duplicate content and bad SEO, and at the same time my others pages outside of the forum have better results.
So I guess after this test, professional webmasters should not use firebard because of SEO.
I am curently looking to migrate from fireboard to phpBB3, but what a work!
Really SAD the Fireboard team does not care about the duplicate content HUDGE problem, this sabotage their very nice work.

However, if a FB team member read this topic before I migrate, I would be please to give money to sponsor a real fix for this problem.
Please note also that duplicate content generate THOUSANDS of rewrited urls with SH404.
This is really insane for my database on a dedicated server, and I don't imagine how this would be on a shared server.

All the best,

Alexandre

You are correct that there are lots of duplicate links. Had some time tonight to fix most of these issues inside SVN version 673.

It adds nofollow to the following types of links:

user created links inside posts and signatures
threaded vs flat
latest posts (4h, 8h, .... 1 week)
user and admin profiles
user avatars
"report to moderator" link

If you are familiar with SVN you can simply grab the files in SVN 673.

Let me know if I missed some.

Hope this helps!

Oliver

Forgot view.php - Is now also fixed in SVN 676

Hi fxstein,

Thanks for your work. About possible ommisions: shouldn't the links to the latest messages on the fireboard homepage be nofollowed as well? The identical message will be found by the bot under the forum category but with a different url (and will result in duplicate content).

Rickert

Possibly. Please check the latest nightly build (only for testing), as lots of changes have been made since the early SEO work:

joomlacode.org/gf/project/fireboard/frs/

In general there is a much larger issue that FireBoard creates too many unique URLs pointing to the same content. I have focused on deduping that a lot but there is still work left. For example: FB allows you to address each post by its post ID, rather than by the thread and page it sits on. Very nice and simple for anybody who wants to reach a certain post, but very bad for SEO.

Even though I have rewritten most of those links to be properly paginated, every external tool or plugin uses the 'easy' way of pointing to a post within a thread. You only need one of those installed and search engines get thrown for a loop.

I am contemplating on providing an external API of sorts for other tools to get the URL to a particular post, that is properly paginated and formated and to create 303 (permanent redirect) codes for all other URL formats, so search engines know that these are redirect rather than unique pages.

Have not started the work on this as I am helping to get 1.0.5 out the door.

Comments?

I think this is a better way than using nofollow to exclude duplicate urls. As I understand nofollow has never been never intended to do this.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow says that while Google will not index nofollowed pages it will not exclude duplicate content that is already indexed. Other searchengines like Ask ingnore the nofollow tag altogether (and will follow AND index).

So if you say you've already rewritten most links to be properly paginated does that mean that you're advising not to use the code in SVN673 and wait till 1.0.5?

Rickert

Yeh nofollow will only help for google, i think, most/if not all other engines ignore the tag and index what they like lol.

@fxstein,

So if you say you've already rewritten most links to be properly paginated does that mean that you're advising not to use the code in SVN673 and wait till 1.0.5?

Could you please give me a comment on this?

Thanks upfront

rickert wrote:
@fxstein,

So if you say you've already rewritten most links to be properly paginated does that mean that you're advising not to use the code in SVN673 and wait till 1.0.5?

Could you please give me a comment on this?

Thanks upfront

Yes SVN 673 is way outdated by now - I believe the SVN is over 800 by now. Please test the most current nightly builds instead.

Thx!