1. Multiple indexes for the board. vBSEO had a nice option to make all of them forward to what you wanted. Right now I have /forums/, /forums/index, /forums/index.php, /forums/index.php?, and I believe there may be a few others like index.php/index or something, I forget what I've seen but it was disturbing. Has anyone created an htaccess file or a mod that would reconcile it to 1 URL?

 

2. Sitemap - which is the best site map to use? Someone mentioned Spanner's sitemap to me and said it will be the best one once they upgrade. They also mentioned communityseo's sitemap is terrible. And then I saw a paid one: icelabz.net/sitemap So I really don't know which one to use or which one of the best option and has the least errors.

 

I think that's it for now.

I edited the global_header template and replaced the link in there to the domain. I did on a few sites and it seems to work well. IPB does set 301's for any non-standard links and I haven't' seen any adverse effects yet.

 

I don't use a sitemap. I will be installing on soon though. I want to test out a theory I have. It will be a good article once I get my data together.

Do you mean defaultHEADER? I don't see a global_header.

Yes default header. Sorry about that.

What kind of edit did you make to defaultHeader?

I took everything out except for the logo change bit. I then just added the site url in place of the other stuff in the link.

 

Mine looks like this:

 

<a href="http://domain.com"><img src='{parse replacement="logo_img"}' alt='{$this->lang->words['logo']}' style="float:left;" /></a>

Ahhh, OK. I made the following edit, to get the logo URL, the tab menu URL and the breadcrumb URL all uniform -

 

<a href='{parse url="act=idx" seotitle="false" base="public"}' title='{$this->lang->words['go_home']}' rel="home" accesskey='1'><img src='{parse replacement="logo_img"}' alt='{$this->lang->words['logo']}' /></a>

That results in all three links ending up as /index

I did some messing around in htaccess and just have one more thing to figure out.

 

Does anyone know how to get the index.php? & index.php (JUST THAT, not if it shows index.php?messenger_blahblah0839) to redirect to the folder?

 

I have index redirecting to the forums folder with this:

 

RewriteRule ^index$ . [R=301,L]

Hope this helps someone.

I don't go that deep into it because the only ones that see those links are members. It would take some regex. Post an eaxact link and I can work one up for you.

So members are the only ones that sees index.php? and index.php...?

 

B/c if you type in either those into the browser it takes you to your forum home. I just want to make sure there aren't multiple ways to get to the forum page for google to index.

Just to give everyone an update, I purchase the icelabz sitemap. It's quite similar to that of vBSEO's sitemap, in which it allows you to give priority to threads. The one thing I liked more than vBSEO's is the ability to give certain forums a higher priority...if it was an option in VBSEO, I never saw it. But for me, it's ideal b/c I have a lot of forums for tutorials and information that people really want, and now I can label it as very important.

 

The only thing I don't like is he has it produce "2" sitemaps. One for forums and one for topics. I suggested making an index file to link to the separate ones so I guess we'll see if he implements that soon. But I've added it to Google Webmasters, Bing Webmasters, and Yahoo Site Explorer so we'll see how everything goes.

 

Stoo (and then some numbers on the end of his name) will be updating his sitemap product, and it will be free. He told me he was wanting to add more features to it than icelabz (which use to be minverseo or w/e the name was) so if you haven't purchased one yet and have the patience for it, his 2.0 product should be releasing in (my guess) a few months at the most.