Which Is The Best phpBB SEO Mod?

[whoops, I wrote this a while ago, but forgot to post it.]

So, in the back of my mind I had been kind of avoiding phpBB. Maybe it was because of all the complaints about spammer problems, complicated permissions, or security issues.

Or maybe becuase phpBB is kind of the juggernaut of this space (free php forums). You can go with the status quo or hang with the cool kids at SMF, or the even cooler kids at myBB.

Checking out the SEO mod options, I found a nice page to roll your own, but I’m kind of a lazy bastard and was hoping to avoid all that.

SEO Mod

This mod looks really good. The only downside I noticed was it doesn’t eliminate duplicate URLs.

Magic SEO URL

This one costs money, but, frankly, it left me scratching my head. The demo board seems good enough with nice looking URLs. But the main site gave off a weird vibe, like it was for a fake site or was hocking an infomercial product.

It set off my engineer’s spider sense, like it was written by a marketing person with minimal contact with the programmer that wrote the product. (Actually, now that I look at the site again, it looks like it’s originally a Czech product, so I’m guessing a lot of the text on the English site was lost in transation.)

phpBB SEO

At this point, in the back of my mind, I was still thinking I would go with SMF or myBB and seriously tweak their existing mods. That thought ended when I saw the stuff at phpbb-seo.

If I worked full-time on an SEO mod for SMF or myBB, it still wouldn’t be as good as the mod at phpbb-seo. They actually have three different versions depending on how much effort you want to put into it. Simple, Mixed, and Advanced.

When looking at the previous seo mods, I kept thinking of “nice-to-have” features. After combining their Advanced SEO, Zero duplicate, Dynamic Meta Tag, and Optimal title mods, I couldn’t think of anything else to add. (granted, with SMF and probably myBB, the Meta tags and page titles are already pretty good by default).

Looking at phpBB SEO Admin page, here are some of the settings that you can tweak to your heart’s delight:

Profiles and groups injection: Yes [x] No [ ]
nickname-uxx.html instead of memberxx.html.

Virtual folder Profiles: Yes [ ] No [x]
phpBB/nickname-uxx/(topics/) or phpBB/memberxx/(topics/) instead of
phpBB/nickname-uxx(-topics).html and phpBB/memberxx(-topics).html.

Profiles ID removing: Yes [x] No [ ]
example.com/phpBB/member/nickname instead of the default
example.com/phpBB/nickname-uxx.html.

Common Search and User messages pages rewriting: Yes [x] No [ ]
phpBB/messages/nickname/topics/
VS phpBB/nickname-uxx-topics.html
VS phpBB/memberxx-topics.html.

SID Removing: Yes [x] No [ ]
SID will be removed from 100% of the URLs passing through the phpbb_seo class, for guests thus bots.

Highlights Removing: Yes [x] No [ ]
Highlights will be removed from 100% of the URLs passing through the phpbb_seo class, for guests thus bots.

Remove small words: Yes [x] No [ ]
Allow to remove all words of less than three letters in rewritten URLs.

Virtual Folder: Yes [ ] No [x]
forum-title-fxx/topic-title-txx.html VS topic-title-txx.html

Virtual Root: Yes [ ] No [x]
phpBB3/forum-title-fxx/topic-title-txx.html VS
forum-title-fxx/topic-title-txx.html

Forum URL caching: Yes [x] No [ ] (YES!!!!)
Turns on the cache for forum URLs and allow to separate forum titles from their URL
Example :
forum-title-fxx/ VS any-title-fxx/

Forum ID Removing: Yes [x] No [ ] (YES!!!!)
Get rid of the IDs and delimiters in forum URLs. Only apply if Forum URL caching is activated.
Example :
any-title-fxx/ VS any-title/

Activate the Zero duplicate: Yes [x] No [ ]

Strict Mode: Yes [ ] No [x]

Posts Redirections:
This option will determine how to handle post urls; it can take four values:
* off, do not redirect post url, whatever the case,
* post, only make sure postxx.html is used for a post url,
* guest, redirect guests if required to the corresponding topic url rather than to the postxx.html, and only make sure postxx.html is used for logged users,
* all, redirect if required to the corresponding topic url.