Thursday, March 11, 2010

Which Is The Best SMF SEO Mod?

May 14th, 2009 by s

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

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