| Simple Machines Forum, Joomla and SEO Part 1 |
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| Thursday, 08 March 2007 | |
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Now that Joomla has been around for 18 months, some of its forums are starting to get pretty big. They are becoming potentially huge SEO assets for the accompanying websites. Although not comprehensive, this is a list of some of the biggest Joomla forums:
One thing that immediately becomes evident is that only two of these eight forums are actually integrated into Joomla.
Search for the Rockettheme.com forums and the results are had to distinguish from each other:
If you search for the Joomlashack.com forums and you get similar results.
On the other hand, the Joomla.org forums are also built with Simple Machines but they aren't integrated into Joomla and they don't have the same problems with metadata:
The Mosets.com forums are built with VBulletin and are not integrated into Joomla: Clearly the forums that aren't integrated into Joomla produce much better metadata. If the Simple Machines Bridge wants to become a more popular, a solution will need to be found for the lack of meta titles, descriptions and keywords. Those sites using the Bridge aren't getting the maximum possible SEO benefit from their large forums. Also, its likely that the click-through rate is lower for these pages because the visitors who find them in Google don't have a clear idea about what they'll find when they click.
Tomorrow, in Part 2, we'll take a closer look at other SEO aspects of forums inside and outside of Joomla.
Comments (7)
  written by steve, March 08, 2007
Hi Moonray
Welcome - We've at least one of your great products running here - the translation button gets more use than anything else on the site. Your titles do look good. You must have no metadata in your Globabl Configuration, right? Whats your general impression of SMF in terms of SEO? Do you find you get a lot of Search Engine traffic to the forum?  written by Zorro, March 08, 2007 Joomla.de: 80,148 Posts (VBulletin) should be: Joomla.de: 80,148 topics and about 390,000 posts Nothing to do with SMF, integration or metadata but I kinda couldn't let it slide because I'm one of the moderators there.  Keep up the good work, I've got you on my reading list.  written by steve, March 08, 2007
Hey Zorro - you've grown in size on the list .... more than 50% the size of Joomla.org, thats really a major forum
  written by Moonray, March 09, 2007
Hey Steve,
Thanks for the thumbs up on our translation module. It is taking great shape, at least we think so , and is going to be released as a component soon. Hope you'll it too. I do have meta data in the global configuration, but they are only the main site keywords. I have not worked too much on meta data as they are anyway generally neglected by most search engines. SEO wise, I am happy with the forum, quite a few visitors. The major disadvantage of the bridge is that every time you upgrade to the new version, the item ID changes and that creates new URLs. May be factor to consider. I did suggest Orstio to make auto installs so that this problem can be overcome. I am not sure in which stage that is now. You have great site and I like to read your posts here. Keep up the good work! Moonray written by mac_jsn, June 04, 2007
Okay folks.... this is a bit nerdy but what the heck.
http://www.protrackr.com/track/www.alledia.com Link Popularity: Google Links: 231 Yahoo Links: 362 MSN Links: 11,171 Search Engine Saturation: (indexed pages) Google: 492 Yahoo: 7,902 I didn’t want to list down the address and phone number displayed on the site though. Interesting stats! written by steve, June 05, 2007
A neat tool isn't it? I wouldn't trust it much for accuracy though - much of the data there is out of data, and Alexa, well its traffic stats are a bit of a joke. The SEO toolbar for Firefox provides the same information in an easier-to-use and more up-to-date format.
As for the contact details - its the same as you'll find on our contact form and in the Yellow Pages, so no big deal there. Write comment
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Check it out: fficial&hs=xQd&filter=0'>Google Search Results, Joomlaspan Forum
Moonray