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[SEO] Share your changes for SEO*

LinusIndigoLinusIndigo
edited February 2011 in Vanilla 2.0 - 2.8
Hi I was just wondering if anyone would be willing to share any changes they've made to their vanilla 2 install to improve search engine optimization? I also have been anticipating a plugin I think @tim mentioned called seo magic? If anyone's made changes that they want to share, I'd appreciate it.
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    pixelinepixeline New
    Apart from implementing Friendly URLs (by simply setting the "rewrite" variable in the conf/config.php to TRUE) i don't see much else to do except having a very active forum. And that's beyond the development scope...
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    LinusIndigoLinusIndigo
    Hmm, could be true. What about sitemaps? Meta descriptions? Keywords for the lamer search engines? Maximum url lengths? Stop words? Social bookmarking buttons? No indexing of pages with little value? etc etc..
    I know that it is possible to rank well without considering these factors, but I was just wondering if anyone had done anything to further 'optimize' their sites.
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    pixelinepixeline New
    Good point. I checked and the default head tags does not contain any meta tags. I'm going to have a crack at it, a good way to learn how to make plugins.
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    LinusIndigoLinusIndigo
    Awesome, let me know how it goes.
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    pixelinepixeline New
    There it goes
    http://vanillaforums.org/addon/611/seocompanion
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    LinusIndigoLinusIndigo
    Whoa you work fast.. Thanks, I'll check it out right now.
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    LinusIndigoLinusIndigo
    Great plugin, the meta descriptions appear to be working like a charm. I was getting some pretty ugly descriptions in Google so this is really great. I don't use tags (though I might now) so I'm not sure about the keywords. Thanks for the plugin!
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    pixelinepixeline New
    Just updated to 0.2 with the possibility to set default values (like on the home page of the forum). You'll have to hardcode them in the php file. I'll look into creating a Settings screen.
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    LinusIndigoLinusIndigo
    Thanks again, it seems to work perfectly.
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    vizionaviziona New
    check also:
    http://vanillaforums.org/addon/540/discussionexcerpt2
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    kingprawnkingprawn
    I took out Permalinks from discussion pages. They generate a huge number of duplicate content for no reason. By default they do not only link to the discussion page with an anchor in the end #itemXX, instead they link to a separate URL for each post which then loads the same content as the regular discussion URL does.

    Copy /applications/vanilla/views/discussion/helper_functions.php to /themes/YOUR_THEME/views/discussion/helper_functions.php

    Search for "permalink" in the new file and delete these lines:

    <span class="Permalink"> <?php echo Anchor(T('Permalink'), $Permalink, 'Permalink', array('name' => 'Item_'.($CurrentOffset+1), 'rel' => 'nofollow')); ?> </span>

    Removing the permalinks solves the biggest part of vanilla's duplicate content problem. There are still many pages with the same content accessible through different URLs but as long as these URLs are not linked anywhere they shouldn't make a problem for Google.
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