Which Is The Best SMF SEO Mod?
May 14th, 2009 by sSince 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:
So, despite my love for SMF, this was a showstopper, and it was time to move on.
Next Up, Checking Out myBB
Posted in smf | 
4 Comments »
June 6th, 2009 at 4:44 am
SMF itself will remove duplicate URLs, at least in SMF 2.0.
As to the structure of the URLs, what’s wrong with them? You can also change them, the filter system should make it simple to change the rewritten URLs (though maybe not easy, it depends on what you want to do to them.)
And yes, it only does one thing, and it does it well. That’s by design.
If you want anything more, install extra mods. I think all you really need though is a good semantic theme. Check out Eren’s themes.
June 6th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Do you have a demo forum for pretty URLs available? I didn’t see anything linked off the Google Code site or the SMF mods page.
I looked at this a while ago, and have since gone through a bunch of other sites, so I’ll need to refresh my memory.
June 6th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
No not anymore sorry, the server I was using got taken offline.
June 6th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Also, SMF 2.0 RC2 should add support for canonical URLs, removing the problem of duplicate URLs. Pretty URLs will rewrite these canonical URLs too. 0 page numbers are no longer included. It handles redirecting boards from alternate URLs. It currently only supports one URL for topics though that’s alright as Cool URLs don’t change. If you do want to change them you need to manually change them by editing the database. I plan to add interfaces for that in the future. It stores all the URLs in the database, so topic and board IDs are only needed in the case of duplicate topic titles.
I hope my mod is solid and reliable, though I won’t pretend it will suit everyone. Just most people