Several months ago I was pissed that I wasn’t getting any traffic from search engines to my History Forum. I’m leaving the link out of it right now, so this post doesn’t get indexed front page for my search term. Anyways… I was getting 0, absolutely 0 traffic from Google, Yahoo, MSN and any other search engine. I should mention that my forum runs on PHPBB, and if you want to know which one I’m talking about, just look on the right sidebar under My Network.

After browsing around, I came to realize my problem was that I never removed Session IDs from the URLs. A session id is when a url ends in something like this:

http://forums.domain.com/viewtopic.php?t=1689&sid=c80e688fbf4ec5347f170b3e4r2067b7

Those are awful URLs and search engines do not index sites like that. Well they might index a few, but they are not friendly that’s for sure.

So I was looking around for a solution and found this website: Optimizing phpbb

It gives you the step by step instructions on how to optimize your phpbb forum in under 3 minutes so it will get indexed in search engines. And trust me, it works. Since implementing this, I have noticed my number of pages being indexed going up every week. I have over 10,000 posts on the forum, but currently only 2,000 indexed pages on Google, so we still have a ways to go. But I’ve seen a nice jump in traffic and am now getting 250+ uniques/day and have over 500 members on the forum.

I don’t have an exact number right now, but I’m getting a lot of search engine traffic. Probably close to 60% of traffic is from Google. I am indexed for all kinds of crazy words like “egbert alfred great william conqueror”, “confederate nicknames”, “battle of tours”, “real fire breathing dragons”, and “who really discovered america”.  All my hits come from people searching for unique history topics.  Searches that don’t have a lot of competition.

It’s time for me to start building up more backlinks, so I can move up in those rankings.

I hope this thread helps someone!