Help with SEO

PaulyWalnuts

PaulyWalnuts

Member
Licensed customer
Lemme preface this with the fact that I'm so old I could sell myself on car-fax as a classic antique. Point being, I don't follow things like I used to. I got that "Can't remember ****" syndrome; oldtimerse disease. It's taken me 4 months to setup my forum.

That said, I now need help with SEO. I know this app creates a sitemap automagically, but it creates a compressed file in a sub-folder, not a sitemap.xml in the root of the forum folder.

I read somewhere, something about Open Graphics or something. Can't rightly say I remember, but I understand it's important. I think these need to be on every page?! How TF am I supposed to keep up with that? 10 new topics get created in one day and I'm supposed to edit some file to include something about, content and SH*T? I don't believe that for a second.

I see this package comes with something dealing with SEO within "Options", but it's WAY over my head!

I'm hoping some kind soul will help me out with this? Come to think of it, I don't care if you have a soul, as long as you don't sabotage my board:)
 
Not quite sure I understand what you’re wanting but Xenforo has good SEO built in generally. I didn’t do anything except - backlinks. I also use Bob’s Article Management System as a home page and that has some very good SEO options helping the articles come up on Google etc

Some things to do in acp - add meta icons and logo.

I also have a YouTube channel and backlink the forum on that. Others you can add a backlink in the account info if you open accounts in places like quora, unsplash, trust pilot, linked in. Pinterest, and various others.
 
One of the things people are often concerned about is “crawl budget” the theory being Google will only index a certain number of pages so you can ask it not to index pages that won’t actually be helpful, e.g. if you have an off topic or general chat forum, threads that just ramble and go nowhere useful, etc.

To noindex a forum/node go into the advanced settings for that specific node. Or for a specific thread to noindex in an otherwise indexable node you can find it in the thread edit box.

I also edit thread titles sometimes if the title isn’t descriptive of the topic. I’ll also merge threads with the exact same topic.

edit: I believe the best thing is still backlinks from good sites and great well written content, which is not so easy with UGC hence the steps above. But it’s worth writing some good (non ai) articles and see if you can get backlinks to them.
 
Last edited:
Mr Lucky said:
One of the things people are often concerned about is “crawl budget” the theory being Google will only index a certain number of pages so you can ask it not to index pages that won’t actually be helpful, e.g. if you have an off topic or general chat forum, threads that just ramble and go nowhere useful, etc.

To noindex a forum/node go into the advanced settings for that specific node. Or for a specific thread to noindex in an otherwise indexable node you can find it in the thread edit box.

I also edit thread titles sometimes if the title isn’t descriptive of the topic. I’ll also merge threads with the exact same topic.

edit: I believe the best thing is still backlinks from good sites and great well written content, which is not so easy with UGC hence the steps above. But it’s worth writing some good (non ai) articles and see if you can get backlinks to them.
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And, THAT my young friend is exactly why I need help. I have NO idea what half of your acronyms mean or what your talking about. ;)

Seriously, I'm 82-years-old, early stages of Alzheimer's. I read articles, then read some more, then halfway into an article I realize I've already read it. And I just can't understand the articles anymore because I already forgot what the last paragraph said.
 
PaulyWalnuts said:
And, THAT my young friend
Click to expand...
I am an OAP (acronym for old age pensioner or senior citizen)
PaulyWalnuts said:
I have NO idea what half of your acronyms
Click to expand...
I only used three acronyms and they are easy to look up.

e.g. = exampli gratia which means for example.

UGC = user generated content, like what happens on a forum thread

ai = artificial intelligence. I mentioned this as I believe it’s better to have articles that are written by a real person, not a robot.
 
Or just carry on with the forum and not worry about SEO. Were you wanting more visibility and membership for the site - hence SEO? Write lots of content (and articles) as mentioned above.
 
Alvin63 said:
Or just carry on with the forum and not worry about SEO. Were you wanting more visibility and membership for the site - hence SEO? Write lots of content (and articles) as mentioned above.
Click to expand...
My friend is the knowledgeable one. I can make my own vape juice, but I can't answer technical questions. I have no idea what questions I ask unless I go back to the forums I learned from to copy/paste my questions from those sites. That's not gonna help.

My friend is out of his country and has been almost all year so far. I figure I haven't much to lose building SEO.
 

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