Category Archives: SEO

Phpbb title tweaking

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Phpbb is an open source software widely used for forums. The main reason is its minimal cost. Another reason for the open source lovers (like me) is the fact that it is one of the most successful free & open projects.

Unfortunately compared to other commercial boards it has less or not at all SEO orientation.

One of the things that needs to be fixed are the titles.
They are arranged in a not so good way. For SEO reasons it is preferable to show first the forum/topic title and then the board details & domain name.

Another thing that needs to be taken into consideration is the user friendly appearance.
We often have to balance between a user friendly website and a SEO friendly website but it is no so hard this time. In this case the users want to see the domain name in index title first, but then, when they start exploring the forums and topics they are more interested in topic’s/forum’s title.

So, we have to show the topic/forum title first on all pages except from the index page.

Time to mess with code:
In phpbb normally we find something like this, in overall_header.html (/<forum_root>/styles/<template_name>/template/overall_header.html):

<title>{SITENAME} - <!-- IF S_IN_MCP -->{L_MCP} -
<!-- ELSEIF S_IN_UCP -->{L_UCP} - <!-- ENDIF -->{PAGE_TITLE}</title>

We have to change this line into:

<title><!-- IF SCRIPT_NAME eq 'index' --> {SITENAME} - <!-- IF S_IN_MCP -->
{L_MCP} - <!-- ELSEIF S_IN_UCP -->{L_UCP} - <!-- ENDIF -->{PAGE_TITLE}
<!-- ELSE -->{PAGE_TITLE} - <!-- IF S_IN_MCP -->{L_MCP} -
<!-- ELSEIF S_IN_UCP -->{L_UCP} - <!-- ENDIF -->{SITENAME}<!-- ENDIF --></title>

Some explanations on the code:

The basic structure is of if/elseif/else/endif in phpbb templates is:

<!-- IF  -->

<!-- ELSEIF  -->

<!-- ELSE -->

<!-- ENDIF -->

The way to check if we are on index.php is:

SCRIPT_NAME eq 'index'

If you want to replace index with another page simply change ‘index’ with the webpage name without the “.php”.

Regards,
Vasilis Mavroudis

Google basic search tips

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Ok, these are pretty basic and most people know them already.
But I’ll write them anyway, because I tend to forget everything I don’t use often. So I’ll use this as a notebook available from everywere to anyone…

    link:url Shows other pages with links to that url.
    related:url Same as “what’s related” on serps.
    site:domain Restricts search results to the given domain.
    allinurl: Shows pages with all terms in the url.
    inurl: Like allinurl, but only for the next query word.
    allintitle: Shows only results with terms in title.
    intitle: Similar to allintitle, but only for the next word. “intitle:seoforgoogle google” finds only pages with seoforgoogle in the title, and google anywhere on the page.
    cache:url Shows the Google version of the passed url.
    info:url Shows a page containing links to related searches, backlinks, and pages containing the url. This is the same as typing the url into the search box.
    spell: Will spell check your query and search for it.
    stocks: Will lookup the search query in a stock index.
    filetype: Restricts searches to that filetype. “-filetype:pdf” to remove Adobe PDF files.
    maps: If you enter a street address, a link to Yahoo Maps and to MapBlast will be presented.
    phone: Enter anything that looks like a phone number to have a name and address displayed. Same is true for something that looks like an address (include a name and zip code)
    site:www.somesite.net “+www.somesite.+net” – Shows you how many pages of given site are indexed by google
    allintext: Searches only within text of pages, but not in the links or page title
    allinlinks:     Searches only within links, not text or title

Some external links on topic:
Basic search help
More search help

These “instructions” are commonly used for SEO.

Hope it helps,
Vasilis Mavroudis