MyBB Community Forums

I used some SEO analyzer to go over my site and give me suggestions to better optimize my forum and one of them was adding a h1 tag because there wasn't one. This is obviously really easy to do, but what's the best place to put it? I don't want to just have random text out that says "Deep Discussions", but I do want search engines to recognize that it's there. So basically what I'm asking is... Is there someway that I could add it in some place on my forum that's not really visible to the visitor's eye, but recognizable by search engines?

add it and use css to make it hidden? I think that it still shows to bots if you do that

(2012-08-01, 01:04 AM)Leefish Wrote: [ -> ]add it and use css to make it hidden? I think that it still shows to bots if you do that

Oh duh, I didn't even think of that.

I'll give it a try and see if it works.

Hm. I've been wondering about this, as well. Is there other ways to do this, besides the suggestion Leefish made?

It depends on your forum header. If you have space and a reasonable font then you can actually use the h1 tag in the header and display it. www.communityplugins.com does it like that and it does look good on their theme.

Actually (whoops) they don't but they could. I saw this trick on one of quacktaculars themes for mybb 1.4 - realise I think was.

(2012-08-01, 01:04 AM)Leefish Wrote: [ -> ]add it and use css to make it hidden? I think that it still shows to bots if you do that

It has been rumored, and in some cases, confirmed that some search crawlers check for containers that are made hidden to users deliberately for these purposes exactly. Thus, the site can get punished for this or the very least, the hidden information gets ignored.

(2012-08-01, 01:18 AM)Alex C. Wrote: [ -> ]

(2012-08-01, 01:04 AM)Leefish Wrote: [ -> ]add it and use css to make it hidden? I think that it still shows to bots if you do that

Oh duh, I didn't even think of that.

I'll give it a try and see if it works.

Keep in mind Google penalizes for adding anything bots can see that humans cannot. You're better off pulling an IPB and doing something like this:

why not put the H1 around the category names on the index page, the category name on forumdisplay, thread title on showthread and then set the CSS for the H1 tag to match your theme setting for those items. you dont have to make it hidden, just make it match your theme

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(2012-08-01, 02:37 AM)Leefish Wrote: [ -> ]It depends on your forum header. If you have space and a reasonable font then you can actually use the h1 tag in the header and display it. www.communityplugins.com does it like that and it does look good on their theme.

Actually (whoops) they don't but they could. I saw this trick on one of quacktaculars themes for mybb 1.4 - realise I think was.

i actually just went and changed to H1 in several of the pages, maybe it will make a difference.... home page (portal), index, forumdisplay, showthread, memberlist, and mysubscriptions. mydownloads is a lot more difficult to work due to its template design. i just copied the .thead class and called it h1 and then added margin:0;

Excellent idea Pavemen. I shall copy that

I put one in my footer with a description of my forum