Member Avatar for mortgage-pro-se

Anyone every use this application?

Is there anything which needs to be done to boards to make them editable for the googlebot?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by I, Brian

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A practical, low-risk plan that follows , and ’s suggestions but gives concrete steps and checks to finish the job.

Start with a safe checklist: make a full backup (files + DB) and test on a staging site; enable any built‑in “Friendly URLs” (FURLs) or SEO settings from the forum admin first — modern Invision/IPS installations expose this in the admin and will save a lot of template-hacking. (invisioncommunity.com)

If FURLs aren’t available, use server rewrite rules rather than editing every template link. Example .htaccess snippet for mapping a pretty topic URL to the existing query parameter (adjust names to match the forum’s parameter names and test on staging):

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

Skip real files/directories

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]

/topic/123/any-title -> index.php?showtopic=123

RewriteRule ^topic/([0-9]+)(?:/.*)?$ /index.php?showtopic=$1 [L,QSA]
</IfModule>

Use Apache’s mod_rewrite docs for more complex parameter handling; keep redirects atomic and use 301s for any URL changes. (httpd.apache.org)

Technical SEO hygiene to do after URLs are stable: generate and submit an XML sitemap and keep it updated; add rel="canonical" on pages that could appear under multiple URLs; and do not block CSS/JS needed to render pages (Google needs them to see the page correctly). Use the URL Inspection and Sitemaps reports in Search Console to confirm what Google actually sees. (developers.google.com)

Quick troubleshooting checklist: verify HTTP status (curl -I), confirm canonical tag in the rendered HTML, check robots.txt for accidental disallows, clear forum caches after template changes, and watch Search Console Index Coverage and Crawl Stats. For large forums, selectively noindex low‑value pages (profile/search pages) to preserve crawl budget.

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Member Avatar for Dani

By default, all of the pages in an Invision forum are along the lines of index.php?showforum=XX and index.php?showtopic=XX

This is not too search engine friendly because of the query strings in the URLs. It's better to have clean URLs such as /showforum/XX/ or /showforumXX.html

I really don't have much experience personally with Invision to be able to help you do this. What I will say is that you need to use mod_rewrite in an .htaccess file to rewrite the URLs. Check out some other threads on mod_rewrite here to figure out how to do that.

Then, you'll have to edit your Invision forum templates. More specifically, the forum index and the actual forums showing the threads - and wherever it has a reference to go to index.php?... edit it out to look like threadXX.html or forumXX.html

Did that make sense? If not, I'll try to offer more assistance.

Member Avatar for big_k105

yeah i would recommend using the mod_rewrite i personally havent used it yet on my invision forum but i know you can. and there is also a search engine friendly mod that you can add to the invision forum i personally havent had much problem getting indexed but i need to do the mod_rewrite to get more of my pages indexed :)

Member Avatar for mortgage-pro-se

CSCGal that kind of went over my head :cry:

Or three any other boards in your opinion which would work better? I am looking for something that will not be too tough.

Member Avatar for Dani

Well, as you can see, I use vBulletin, which will run you $160. The best free forum systems are Invision and phpBB. Invision I have absolutely no experience, so perhaps I'm not the best person to offer assistance.

However, the quick answer is: "no, Invision and phpBB both are not search engine friendly out of the box. They both require a mod/hack to make them so. Instructions to apply such hacks are available from the respective forum communities. i.e. for phpBB, you can find info at " My previous post was basically an explanantion of what these hacks do.

Member Avatar for big_k105

i dont believe there are any forum software that come completely search engine friendly. and for vb at 160 for an owned lisence is not to bad for a great piece of software. but invision atleast you can use it for free but you wont get any support out of invision themselfs unless you buy a lisence and i have heard that when 2.0 comes out you will have a little tag at the bottom of the forum that says trail version. but if you would want invision support you are paying 199 for a owned license for ever :) but i dont know. i really like invision and there is alot that really like vb. it is an on going debate between forum owners :)

Member Avatar for I, Brian

vbulletin 3 is search engine spiderable out of the box - Invision Power Boards are supposed to be, but from what I've seen spiders will only ever index a fraction of the 1.2 and prior releases. Apparently, that issue is being addressed in the current beta version (is it IPB 2??).

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