So I didn’t know much about myBB previously, but it looks impressive. It looks like it has a great community, and there’s a bunch of killer themes.

Most forums don’t come out of the box with good SEO, which is to be expected. Many people don’t care about it or don’t want to much around with mod_rewrite. There may be more SEO mods, but the two that I checked out are the Google SEO plugin and the MyBB SEO mod.

myBB Google SEO Mod
I checked out the mod’s demo forum, and I didn’t really like what I saw. The URLs look like this:
/Forum-Sandbox
/Thread-Im-trying-to-make-2-pages–1688
/User-admin
These are definitely better than the base URLs, but after seeing the mods out there, a little disappointing.

MyBB SEO Mod
Looking at the demo forum, these URLs look better:
/main-theme-f-1.html
/server-overloading-explained-t-2.html
(the user profile URLs look untouched, though)

So my conclusion was not bad, but I’d have to make some improvements.

Next Up, Checking Out phpBB

Since I have a lot of experience already running an SMF site, I had a lot of built-in bias toward going with SMF again. The mod system is by
far the best of the three. Just make a few clicks to install a mod vs. editing a bunch of files. The html templating system is killer. You get a
complete, full-featured site with just the base system, while with others you have to install mods.

Unfortunately, SMF is lacking in the SEO department. As I said in the previous post, I can make my own modifications and improvements, but I’d like to have the SEO for a forum down rock solid from the beginning and not have to make any risky changes.

SEO4SMF
This used to be a pretty impressive mod, but I recall it ran into some security warning issues a while back. Plus, there hasn’t been any development on it for a while, and it looks as if the project is dead.

Pretty URLs
Pretty URLs looks pretty promising, but so far it looks like it’s just limited to that…prettifying URLs. It doesn’t seem to tackle removing duplicate URLs, and I wasn’t too crazy about the structure of the end result of the URL.

The demo forum seems to be down, but the URLs look like this:
/prettyurls/general-discussion/welcome-to-smf/0/

Installing Pretty URLs would be a good start, but then I’d still have to go through more steps like these:

SMF SEO Tips #1

SMF SEO Tips #2

So, despite my love for SMF, this was a showstopper, and it was time to move on.

Next Up, Checking Out myBB

So I’m about to start a new forum, and it took me a while for me to decide which free php forum software to use. It took me a while to come to a conclusion, so I thought I’d post my thoughts in case someone else finds it handy.

I’ve been running an SMF forum for quite a while and it’s been a joy to run. I tend to tinker a lot with the forum code, and SMF is really written well and laid out nicely. A few years ago when I started that forum, I was trying to decide between phpBB2 and SMF. SMF won in my case because of its templating system. It was the easiest for me to tweak and customize quickly.

But after running that first forum for a while, I’ve come to realize how important SEO comes into play when running a forum. With other things, I feel I can just customize and improve things as time progresses, but with SEO, it has to be right from the beginning. Making a change later can really muck things up if you’re not careful.

Apparently I didn’t learn my lesson with my SMF forum, since I would have put more thought into SEO for this blog (which sucks), but it’s too late now to make any changes.

So this time when deciding what forum platform to use, I went with a purely SEO perspective. It quickly became clear that, at this time, the choices for a free php forum come down to SMF, myBB or phpBB. I thought that I’d put some weight into which platform had the better themes, but it seems like there are enough themes out there for all three of them that you can find what you’re looking for.

Hmm, this post is getting long, so I’m going to split this up.

Next Up, Checking Out SMF