SEO in PHPnuke

Shiz · 10 Mar 2006 at 15:52

I am trying to get some better search engine ranks for my website, we are using phpnuke 7.9.

So far we have dynamic meta tags, meta descriptions, page title tags. We are also trying to make sure that all images have alt tags and title tags.

Is there anything else that we can do apart form clever keyword righ page text?

Lt. Manlove · 10 Mar 2006 at 16:21

Biggest tip I can give is rewrite your URLs, especially with a .html extension.

robmiller · 10 Mar 2006 at 16:33

Lt. Manlove said:
Biggest tip I can give is rewrite your URLs, especially with a .html extension.

Giving a file extension will not affect your ranking at all, and is actually discouraged by the W3C because it discourages forward-compatability.

Lt. Manlove · 10 Mar 2006 at 20:48

robmiller said:
Giving a file extension will not affect your ranking at all, and is actually discouraged by the W3C because it discourages forward-compatability.

Using mod_rewrite? Are you sure?

Beansprout · 11 Mar 2006 at 02:15

Lt. Manlove said:
Using mod_rewrite? Are you sure?

Why would a file extension affect rankings? :/

Common tricks are to use mod_rewrite to make the URL include the headline of the article, which is useful for SEO as it's alllll about relevance (well, getting there anyway)

robmiller · 11 Mar 2006 at 02:56

Lt. Manlove said:
Using mod_rewrite? Are you sure?

Of course. Why would adding entirely superfluous content to your URL magically boost your page's ratings? How is ".html" giving something useful to a search engine?

You need to fit relevant search terms into your URLs - most often, this is the title of the page.

akakjs · 11 Mar 2006 at 18:26

I had to answer this very question at work. Basicly I did some tests and research and came up with this:

As Google is extension "aware", I highly doubt that using "html" over any other extension will make a difference. What I beleve is important though is the "content-type" http header, as its far more likely that Google will be using this to workout what content parser (eg html, word doc, pdf etc) it should apply to the document.

Of course as with all things Google this is mostly speculation.

akakjs

robmiller · 11 Mar 2006 at 18:39

With Google, although a well-crafted page and good URLs work towards getting you well-placed search results, they're nothing compared to lots of relevant (that word again) links. Get lots of high-profile sites with similar content to link to your site and you're golden.

akakjs said:
I had to answer this very question at work. Basicly I did some tests and research and came up with this:

As Google is extension "aware", I highly doubt that using "html" over any other extension will make a difference. What I beleve is important though is the "content-type" http header, as its far more likely that Google will be using this to workout what content parser (eg html, word doc, pdf etc) it should apply to the document.

Of course as with all things Google this is mostly speculation.

akakjs

Your content type will virtually always (until IE7 sees widespread adoption anyway) be text/html, though, so that's largely irrelevant.

Hopefully Augmented or someone will come and confirm/deny/elucidate

Shiz · 11 Mar 2006 at 18:42

We are using Mod_rewrite to change our php pages to html pages. The reason for this (for those that dont think it makes a difference) is that php pages can often have lots of question marks and ampersands (&) in them, which some search engines find it hard to read, and therefore ignore that page when they index your site.

Good plan on using it again to add the page headers to the URL though, will try and get on that.

Lt. Manlove · 11 Mar 2006 at 23:47

Beansprout said:
Why would a file extension affect rankings? :/

Common tricks are to use mod_rewrite to make the URL include the headline of the article, which is useful for SEO as it's alllll about relevance (well, getting there anyway)

Ah you were right, I misread something on Google.

robmiller · 12 Mar 2006 at 01:08

Shiz said:
We are using Mod_rewrite to change our php pages to html pages. The reason for this (for those that dont think it makes a difference) is that php pages can often have lots of question marks and ampersands (&) in them, which some search engines find it hard to read, and therefore ignore that page when they index your site.

Good plan on using it again to add the page headers to the URL though, will try and get on that.

That won't affect anything at all. Google often ignores the "dynamic" parts of URLs - that is, the query string - but this:

foo.html?foobar=baz

is just as worthless/worthwhile as:

foo.php?foobar=baz

Beansprout · 12 Mar 2006 at 01:47

Shiz said:
We are using Mod_rewrite to change our php pages to html pages. The reason for this (for those that dont think it makes a difference) is that php pages can often have lots of question marks and ampersands (&) in them, which some search engines find it hard to read, and therefore ignore that page when they index your site.

Good plan on using it again to add the page headers to the URL though, will try and get on that.

Um, so can html pages if the host system is using a funky non-standard setup. For example the NY Times...or maybe you really believe it's static and the extra bits are just to look cool

Seriously, add relevant stuff to URLs. A file extension is distinctly irrelevant (so long as it's correct)