MyBB Community Forums

Hey Guys.

Been using MyBB exclusively for many years but never really bothered with too much SEO other than simply adding the Google SEO mod. This obviously does not give my forum(s) the best chance in getting ranked. Recently I have dug quite deep into SEO and getting one of my sites ranked better on google.

The site concerned would not move above 8/9 place, although on page 1 all the matches we're below the fold.

After a lot of work, research, questions etc it now holds 1st, 2nd or 3rd place depending on the search term I want to rank for, so I wanted to finally be able to contribute back to the community (my coding is not good enough to help in that way)

I'd like to start by thanking Destroy666 from here and KernelPanic (from an SEO forum) both of these people have contributed to the success.


Ok, I'll just list what I have done and provide a few notes for newbies to SEO as to why each change helped.

1) Install Google SEO mod and configure correctly.
2) Added meta tags and description into the index template
3) Created sitemap, excluding "Announcements, Calenders, Events" - added index.php as an additional page
4) Downloaded the robots.txt file created by Google SEO mod and uploaded to server (this stops the bots looking at links that cannot be crawled correctly and links that will degrade SEO)
5) Turned on CSS minify in Server settings in MyBB admin panel (makes the page faster and better in bots eyes)
6) VERY IMPORTANT - Validated the HTML using W3 validator and fixed all errors (bots like clean code)
7) Added the sites to google webmaster tools - both the http://....... and the http://www..... versions
7a) Uploaded the previously created sitemap to both entries in webmaster tools
7b) Selected a primary domain in webmaster tools (I choose the http:// variant)
7c) Selected default location in webmaster tools (I choose unlisted as my site is worldwide based, if yours is country specific then choose that country)
8) VERY IMPORTANT - Canonical links need addressing - let me explain for those who don't understand. A MyBB install will essentially have 4 (FOUR) home pages in the eyes of google bot. http://example.com, http://www.example.com, http://example.com/index.php, http://www.example.com.index.php

This means that if left like that googlebot will see 4 home pages and share the SEO benefit between all 4. What we want is all that pushed into one single page.

In my case I used 301 re-directs in my actual server settings (WHM/Cpanel in my case)

I added 301's directing all traffic to http://example.com

9) I added a paragraph of relevant text to my forums subject on the home page. Google likes this. Not sure how beneficial it was but every little bit helps.

That's pretty much it and it did help me a massive amount. I hope this is of some benefit to the MyBB community.

I think i've covered everything I did but if I remember something not added to this thread I'll edit it in.

Cheers Guys

Thanks for that, very helpful.

Currently trying to work out the best way of dealing with nofollow, which I think is the main thing I'd add to this.

Dan, take a look at this resource: http://letsforum.com/Thread-MyBB-Add-NOF...User-Links .

Generally, enable it on all user-created links. If a user created it, it shouldn't be followed, unless it's a specific circumstance such as an admin wanting to override it with BBCode or something.

Thanks Josh.
I found a number of posts like that, but have now used MySEO which works great (and lets you specify multiple urls to not apply nofollow to).
Seems to be the best way to achieve this at the moment: http://community.mybb.com/thread-166864.html

Useful for us as we regularly link to our blog, main site and so forth.

Thanks for all the comments guys. I'll be updating the OP shortly after the new google algorithm later this month. I have a couple of MyBB test sites and will monitor the relevance of mobile optimisation. I'm expecting this to become a big issue for SEO. More later....

Yes, unfortunately MyBB isn't mobile friendly at all?
What options are there at the moment to make it mobile friendly?

I'm using GoMobile along with Orion Mobile theme (paid for) and this works very well. For MyBB 1.8 you need to DL GoMobile plugin from github

There is anyway to make dynamic meta tags for threads?

(2015-04-22, 02:54 AM)bekircem Wrote: [ -> ]There is anyway to make dynamic meta tags for threads?

I don't know why you'd want that really.

None of the major search engines use meta tags to determine your ranking.

Agreed Marisa. Meta info is not really making much difference to ranking for any of my MyBB sites. I am however adding GoMobile to all of them now as not doing so will have a big negative effect on the sites.