Bing incorporates some seriously cool features, but more importantly it produces spot on results in a quick and efficient manner. Beyond that, with Bing you don’t have to click over to a website to get more information any more, all you have to do is hover over the link and a small pop up with information on that website appears. Microsoft wasn’t kidding when it called Bing a decision engine, but will Bing ever be able to rival Google?

Google is currently the dominant player in the search market receiving about 75% of all search traffic, but in the last month or so Bing has seen a slight increase in visitors while Google has seen a slight drop. In addition, Bing has announced that it will now be indexing Twitter updates in real time.

Whether Bing will ever rival Google or not I do not know, but Bing is a truly innovative search engine with tons of potential.

The bottom line of your website should be to attract and maintain a steady flow of both unique and returning visitors, and if you optimize to much you very well may be discouraging people from visiting your website. As Matt points out, Google has no penalty for over optimization but if you focus on optimization to much and not enough on building a unique and beneficial experience for your users then your site may not do to well overall.

PHBB3 Title Tags

Step one

Open styles/your_theme/template/overall_header.html and near the top of the document in the head section (around line 15) find your current title tag. It should look like this….. 

<title>{SITENAME} &bull; <!– IF S_IN_MCP –>{L_MCP} &bull; <!– ELSEIF S_IN_UCP –>{L_UCP} &bull; <!– ENDIF –>{PAGE_TITLE}</title>

You are going to replace the above code with this code…. 

<title>{PAGE_TITLE) | {SITENAME}</title> 

This will make the title of your category appear before the site name in the title tag. 

Step two

Open the viewforum.php file in your root directory. Next, navigate your way to the following piece of code which is found around line 138. 

page_header($user->lang['VIEW_FORUM'] . ‘ – ‘ . $forum_data['forum_name']); 

You are going to be replacing this line of code with the following….. 

page_header($forum_data['forum_name']);

This is going to remove the “view forum” words from your page title tags. 

Step Three

Open the viewtopic.php file in your root directory. Next, navigate your way to the following piece of code around line 1590. 

page_header($user->lang['VIEW_TOPIC'] .’ – ‘ . $topic_data['topic_title']);

You are going to be replacing this line of code with the following….. 

page_header($topic_data['topic_title']);

This will remove “view topic” from the page title when a user is viewing a topic. 

Step Four

Open the file language/en/common.php. Next, navigate your way to the following piece of code found around line 275. 

‘INDEX’ => ‘Index page’,

Replace the above code with the following….. 

‘INDEX’ => ‘’,

You’re pretty much just going to be deleting the words “index” and “page.” This will remove the “index page” words from your home pages title tag. 

Step Five

Login to the administration control panel of your PHPBB3 forums and select Board Settings from the main page. Next, simply give your website a name. 

That’s it for title tags! Easy enough right? Next we are going to be looking at a few other aspects of SEO in regards to the PHPBB3 forum platform. 

PHPBB3 Robots.txt

A robots.txt file is often overlooked but it can play an important role with your forum. First off I just would like to mention that you can control which robots can and can’t crawl your site through your administration control panel. The point of the robots.txt file is mainly to block duplicate content. You should experiment with the search engines a little to see how they are indexing your website and modify your robots file as needed, but if you’re lost as to where to begin here is an example of a PHPBB3 robots.txt file. 

User-agent: *

Disallow: /viewtopic.php?p=

Disallow: /viewtopic.php?=&p=

Disallow: /viewtopic.php?t=

Disallow: /viewtopic.php?start=

Disallow: /*&view=previous

Disallow: /*&view=next

Disallow: /*&sid=

Disallow: /*&p=

Disallow: /*&sd=a

That’s all I have for now but if anyone has any suggestions or additions that should be made to this post please leave a comment.

My question is, “is this what it has come to?” The internet used to be a place of education and collaboration, but in recent years the internet has developed a more than fair share of crime, hate, and abuse. Teenagers use social websites to bully one another, in some cases so much where the victim becomes severely depressed and in rare cases commits suicide. Hackers use email to distribute vicious malware to invade people’s privacy and steal their personal information. And many shady characters build pornography websites to make a quick buck (usually from underage kids).

With all this misuse of the internet I can see why the Chinese government wanted to mandate that every computer come installed with and use internet filtering software. But, has it really come to the point where the government has to step in? If the software becomes mandatory in the future would this be a violation of people’s rights? And, is this something that we should consider implementing in America?

Leave your comments.

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