Optimize Your phpBB Forum for Search Engine (Google) at Pretty Scripts ();

Dec 092009

Optimize Your phpBB Forum for Search Engine (Google)

Here we will use only .htaccess file to optimize your phpBB forum for search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and many-many others.

This rewrites internally all .html files to .php

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RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteRule (.*).html$ $1.php [L,T=application/x-httpd-php]

Forcing any files to be a certain type of file:

1	ForceType application/x-httpd-php

Name php files .html

1	AddType application/x-httpd-php .html

If using phpbb: Removing SID for guests and using phpBB SEO mod rewrites gives you an htaccess like this-

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RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^s/(.*).pl$ /cgi-bin/$1.php [L]

RewriteRule ^htaccess/.+/([^/]+.html)$ /htaccess/index.php [R=301,L]

RewriteRule ^htaccess/.+-vc([0-9]+).html$ /htaccess/index.php?c=$1 [QSA,L]

RewriteRule ^htaccess/.+-vf([0-9]+)-([0-9]+).html$ /htaccess/viewforum.php?f=$1&start=$2 [QSA,L]

RewriteRule ^htaccess/.+-vf([0-9]+).html$ /htaccess/viewforum.php?f=$1 [QSA,L]

RewriteRule ^htaccess/.+-vt([0-9]+)-([0-9]+).html$ /htaccess/viewtopic.php?t=$1&start=$2 [QSA,L]

RewriteRule ^htaccess/.+-vt([0-9]+).html$ /htaccess/viewtopic.php?t=$1 [QSA,L]

RewriteRule ^htaccess/post([0-9]+).html$ /htaccess/viewtopic.php?p=$1 [QSA,L]

RewriteRule ^htaccess/member([0-9]+).html$ /htaccess/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&u=$1 [QSA,L]

Now my question after doing all this to get my phpbb forum optimized is: Do search engines care about the “expires, etag, last-modification, and cache-control headers?” I can’t find any information about creating real static pages from phpbb, so that apache can create the etag headers and last-modification headers automatically. I can’t even get mod_headers to work with phpbb.

It stands to reason that crawlers would record the last-modified time to display time-based results, so how do they look upon pages that don’t have any of these headers?

At this point I am just going to modify the page_header.php file to generate my own Last-modified and expires and cache-control headers and I will experiment with creating an etag.. the md5 function isn’t very effiecient though.. I think I’ll just start out by giving the expire and last-modified times to expire 10 minutes after requesting the file.. I also want to try and base the last-modified time off of the last post or edit to the data on the page.. what a nightmare!