After about 2 weeks of placing the hacks for phpbb forum on quantumcloud site, Google has started to index the forum. As of 22 may, 2004, google has indexed 69 pages. You can find this out by searching:
"inurl:www.quantumcloud.com/forum/" in google.
Click on the "repeat the search with the omitted results included" to see the results.
Why has it not been indexed before? Phpbb has some built in features that Google does not like. Most severe of them is the session ID. Googlebot comes to the site and jumps from link to link to index the site for relevent keywords. What it does not like is when it sees too much dynamic links. Now to track a user, whenever one visits a phpbb forum, the phpbb scripts puts a session id tag with every url of the topic and sub-forums. So google does not index the site. You need to hack the original phpbb scripts to make it google friendly in many places.
I have been looking at many places to find the proper hacks. And made several changes. I could not use the one most appropiate for this hack. That needs mod rewrite to be enabled in the server. Unfortunately, our server has it disabled. Very bad. I will move to a different host as soon as the term expires. Lesson learned. Before hosting check if it has mod rewrite enabled!
The best place to find info on how to do implement this on your site, go to phpbb community and make a search. Must check out the topic google and phpbb extended.
[http://phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=150631&highlight=enhancegoogleindexing]
I implemented two hacks from this topic. One removes session id for any search engine bot, including google. Another one creates a site map for the forum without any session ID. like this
Forum Sitemap
But the best hack is not this. If you have mod rewrite enabled on your server use the hack from able2know.
[http://www.Able2Know.com]
It lets you have static URL for all the pages of your forum by using .htaccess feature with mod rewrite. This is as friendly as a forum gets!
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