I've made some changes to the site to make it more 'search engine friendly'.

A long time ago I asked search engines to stop indexing us because it was costing us too much bandwidth (i.e. cash).

Now I've re-enabled their searches (we have plenty bandwidth now), I wanted to make our rankings higher when we do get re-indexed (it'll probably take a while tho').

Google apparently uses a 'page drain factor' in its calculation of page relevancy. Page drain is basically the number of links on a page. Pages with exceedingly large link counts get punished in terms of page rank.

Along with some other things to make our site look better to the likes of Google, the changes I've implemented (according to well-published and successful phpBB SEO guidelines) are as follows:

General Changes

* removed SID for anonymous, not-logged-in users (e.g. ?sid=a564343f087 in the URL, which spiders do not like)

Index Page

* unlinked moderator names (27 links gone)
* unlinked last post author names (15 links gone)
* removed last post link icon (15 links gone)
* changed title of page to just 'Bet The Pot'
* removed 'who is online' section when not logged in (saving N links, where N is the number of people who were logged-in at the time)

=52 links gone

Forum Page

* unlinked last post author names (50 links gone)
* removed last post link icon (50 links gone)
* changed title of page to just 'Bet The Pot'

=100 links per page gone

Topic Page

* removed signature display when not logged in (discourages spam sigs, also increases page keyword relevancy)
* removed avatar display when not logged in
* removed jumpbox when not logged in (15 links gone)
* removed prev/next topic links for not-logged-in users (2 links gone)

=17 links gone, keyword relevancy boosted

Search Results Page

* unlinked last post author names
* removed last post link icon

=link savings proportional to results, if anyone links to a BTP search or the spiders find a link to one in-site

That's about it for now!

One change I am going to implement soon is making the name of the poster (next to their post on the topic view page) a link to search results based on that author name. At the moment it just inserts their name into the quickreply box, which is just totally useless.

that last one is really cool.

being economical with the links is a nice touch, too.

tetsuo you are a technical god. Or demigod. Damn cool in any event.

In my experience all you need to increase both search engine rankings and number of hits is to include a massive surfeit of the words "hot", "teen", "blowjob", "fisting", "whore" and "massive bosoms" on your front page. So you've wasted your time with all that technical stuff, Tets.

Google has started re-indexing our site, which is good.

They've covered the categories, it will take their spider a while to muster interest in the posts.



As you can see, the titles of the pages look much nicer!