Yes, it’s pretty friendly, especially with Permalinks on. Are there specific concerns you’re trying to address?
There are also a couple SEO plugins for bbPress floating around if you’d like to make it even better.
https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/if-bbpress-had-seo-plugin-like-wordpress
Looking into this now but your comment confuses me, Chris. Isn’t pretty permalinks on by default (even though the admin indicates that it is not in the options).
Is this not pretty permalinks?
Is bbpress SEO friendly???
Wouldnt it say https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/#thread-2342 or something like that if they weren’t on?
beernews: yes, that’s what pretty permalinks look like. Looks like the options in trunk are now:
None …/forums.php?id=1
Numeric …/forums/1
Name based …/forums/first-forum
It used to be “none, true, slugs” which correspond to the above options in order. I’m not sure if they’re on by default when you install the latest version. There was talk of creating the mod_rewrite rules automatically when turning permalinks on (like WordPress does right now), but I’m not sure if that happens automatically or not yet.
But, with name based (the old slugs option) I think the links would be pretty good for SEO. The slugs might still contain stop words or otherwise be too long, but, they’re still pretty good.
I dare say it’s one of the most SEO friendly forums out of the box (with a few options turned on). Doesn’t do meta keyword and descriptions but I guess most search engines don’t even look at that stuff anymore – would be easy to make a plugin for it though. There’s also a site map plugin available.
Did the SEO-Meta plugin work? That site appears to be down so perhaps someone could be so kind as to re-up it.
CK, what are the few SEO options that you have turned on?
What I meant by that is pretty-permalinks are not turned on by default.
Technically, it’s not just about pretty links and sitemaps. BBPress can produce much cleaner, better structured page code than certain other forum software.
Meta descriptions and keywords are still used by search engines where available. Personally I take the tags associated with each topic and add them to the list of keywords. In the keywords meta:
global $tags;
if($tags) {
foreach ($tags as $t) {
echo $t->raw_tag.', ';
}
}
That said, I still believe that asking whether something is SEO-friendly is asking the wrong question. Work on making forums user-friendly, which then attracts “quality” posts, and the search engines will follow.
timskii, that makes a nice little plugin:
function meta_keywords() {
global $tags;
if (!empty($tags)) {
$keywords="";
foreach ($tags as $t) {$keywords.=$t->raw_tag.', ';}
echo "n".'<meta NAME="keywords" CONTENT="'.trim($keywords,", ").'">'."n";
}
} add_action('bb_head', 'meta_keywords',
;
Where can the above code be stuffed, _ck_?
You can create a full plugin out of it, then activate the plugin, or _ck_ likes to create a single plugin for all the miscellaneous tweaks or mini-plugins, then add this to that file. Adding this to a file of other mini-plugins means you cannot activate and deactivate this independently. That works for tweaks you will always want to use.
A plugin header will need to look something like this:
<?php
/*
Plugin Name: bbPress Tweaks
Plugin URI: http://www.example.com
Description: Various tweaks to bbPress
Author: You
Version: 0.1
*/
Add the above code after that, and call the file bbpress-tweaks.php, put it in my-plugins, then activate it in the bbPress admin. It should look like this when you’re done:
<?php
/*
Plugin Name: bbPress Tweaks
Plugin URI: http://www.example.com
Description: Various tweaks to bbPress
Author: You
Version: 0.1
*/
function meta_keywords() {
global $tags;
if (!empty($tags)) {
$keywords="";
foreach ($tags as $t) {
$keywords.=$t->raw_tag.', ';
}
echo "n".'<meta NAME="keywords" CONTENT="'.trim($keywords,", ").'">'."n";
}
}
add_action('bb_head', 'meta_keywords',;
?>
I’ve downloaded a plugin and now testing it ..
I know this is an old thread, but it’s still relevant… I wanted to share my modifications for SEO:
Basically, what I found was that when I logged onto webmaster tools, it told me that my main keyword for my site was “ago”. This was because on all forums it says the word on the homepage. I changed this to say the name of the topic instead, so it indexes better because it’s more obvious that the content’s changed and also is better for SEO:
How To Change The Freshness Date / Time To The Name Of The Last Topic In BBpress
