SEO for PHPBB

PHPBB is one of the premier free softwares of the internet today. PHPBB is a free forum software that uses PHP and MYSQL for a fast easy setup and has years of fantastic PHPBB skins and PHPBB themes to choose from while customizing your forum.

Sources of PHPBB Tools, MODS, and Themes

http://www.phpbbhacks.com/templates.php - PHPBB themes and skins
http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/catdb.php?db=1 - PHPBB Mods

Optimizing PHPBB for search engines

The best package I have found to date for optimizing the PHPBB free forum software is the able2know mod from able2know.com. This PHPBB modification provides PHPBB session ID removal, Static URLS from MOD rewrite and optimizes the PHPBB forum for what is know as PR leaks (unimportant links).

Able2know boasted over 230,000 pages from their forum listed at the time of publishes that link above and I have achieved similar happy results with their MOD and combinations of others as well as my own changes.

PHPBB session ID removal

This is generally thought to be one of the most important points to optimizing a PHPBB board or any chat board of similar coding. A session ID is a unique number issued everytime a user or spider visits the forum pages. A forum using sassion ID's will be showing the search engines a seemingly different website and page name architechture everytime the search engine returns to the website.

While this is clearly not a spammy website, it will appear always changing in page name and structure on each return and thusly be doomed to never get fully indexed from the start,

MOD rewrite for PHPBB

While this is not agreed to be 100% crucial to getting pages indexed and ranked, a nice static url is generally a good idea in all search engines. The able2know MOD and other similar MODS will transform the page names in a PHPP forum from

viewforum.php?t=123213
to
my-great-thread-vf123213.html

thusly seeming to remove the passed variable in the php page and sending you to a static html page, though it is still the same page. Coupled with a keyword URL MOD that will pack the title of the thread into the page name and meta tags the forum can get well indexed in this way.

Able2know discusses the keyword URL mod here as well.
PHPBB keyword url mod discussion

MOD rewrite is combined with use of the robots.txt file to tell spiders not to index or seek out the pages thought to be useless links of "PR leaks" such as the groups.php and memberlist.php pages, which tend to get spammed up by forum spammers anyhow.

Many good webmasters just remove the memberlist links or the entire page altogether. Also you may want to remove the link field from the profile page as well to avoid those links dumped by drive-by signups.