How to make vanilla seo friendly... block no index no follow robots?

Johnjohny

Hello, i am using the latest vanilla which is great, however I notice in the html source code that duplicate pages, search pages, profile pages and category pages dont seem to have the meta tag no index no follow... This is really bad for seo (because search engine bots are really dumb) are there any plugin or ways to block robots from pages that are low value, duplicate content? I only want really the good pages being indexed like forum topics and not like post urls either..... I really need to block any url that doesnt offer anything unique basically.

Not sure you get post number urls in vanilla but if you do these are a example of something I want robots to be blocked from of no indexed.

ANy advise?

This would benefit every vanilla forum for sure!!!

Thanks.

hgtonight

Welcome to the community!

You want to remove the easiest way to stop bots from indexing a page and implement a different method to do so?

R_J

My advice is to simply not do that ;-)

Look at other popular boards, their SEO plugins and the source they are generating. None of them excludes discussion overviews, and there is no need for that. The only "duplicate" content are the headings of the discussions. That shouldn't be harmful.

But if you really want to implement something like that, you would have to add a robot nofollow meta tag to categories and discussions controller. That post should be a good place to start: http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/comment/196466/#Comment_196466

But I'm convinced that a plugin like that wouldn't help you.

Johnjohny

Thanks for your replys, Yeah its a tough one albeit google fault with penalizing website just for being normal websites... Sometimes though profile pages for example can be a little bit thin on content and just generic vannila forum profile fields.. Thanks for the link....

x00

You wouldn't want to remove the discussions list.

Those little link the the actual post, this what users expect and what search engines want, relevancy.

There may be specific case that you could add a no index tag. Basically you can use theme hook, then some logic to determine the page then

$Sender->Head->AddTag('meta', array('name' => 'robots', 'content' => 'noindex,follow'));

However make sure you have sound reasons for it. There is a awful lot of crap written under the guise of SEO.

x00

@Johnjohny said:
Thanks for your replys, Yeah its a tough one albeit google fault with penalizing website just for being normal websites... Sometimes though profile pages for example can be a little bit thin on content and just generic vannila forum profile fields.. Thanks for the link....

This is a myth. Google has consistently tried to kill SEO tricks, becuase it really should be about relevance only. Their algorithms are trying to make the difference between indexing and real life relevance minimal as possible.

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him! As the phrase goes.

The best sites think about how a user would enter a site, what they would search for to get there, and how they are relevant and applicable to the user.

Those sites do better overall.

In the case of a forum, you have really harness the power of your user base to help you, be innovative in incentivising this process.

Content always wins over anything else.

x00

Also with advanced statistical methods like data training, neural networks, etc they can tell better normal sites from spam sites.

peregrine

@x00 said
If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him! As the phrase goes.

reminds me of the joke.

Q. What did Buddha say to the hot-dog vendor?

A. Make me one with everything.