Underachiever SEO

First of September, 2008 will be the starting date of the second Bulgarian SEO competition with a prize fund. There will be term prizes and one final prize. The money are be symbolic for western countries but for Bulgaria are just OK. More info will be available after the start of the competition. All prizes are provided by a sponsor.

Few things are clear. All types of domains newly registered or old ones can take part. Subdomains in Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, etc. will also be allowed.
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Although third version of phpBB Olympus was released, there are many webmasters that use the second version. Whith the help mod(ifications) and some help of myself, the second version remains the best free bulletin board systems (IMHO even best than paid forum softwares). Here are the steps that have to be maid, to have fully optimized phpBB forum:

1. We apply the advises from Avoiding Duplicate Content on Index/Home Page article

2. We apply the advises from Avoiding Duplicate Content on Inner Pages article

3. We install Guest Sessions Mod . This mod is not validated by phpBB team but I never experienced problem using it. [read more...]

We are going to talk about NOT how to avoid duplicate content on already existing pages but how to avoid it, if for example we have bought old (expired) domain that has many indexed pages that would result in 404 error onaour site.

Some webmasters place the following code in .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 403 index.php
ErrorDocument 404 index.php

which creates the problem with duplicate content, as these directives redirect all users that visited forbidden and not found pages to the home page but keeping the URL unchanged. Another method used is to redirect the users to specially designed 403 and 404 pages by placing that code:
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A you might know, or not know, www.site.com, www.site.com/index.php, site.com and site.com/index.php are 4 different pages for search engines, although you see the same page.

To avoid the problem with duplicate content you have to have: Apache server running and mod_rewrite module installed. Now, somewhere in your .htaccess file include this code:

Options +FollowSymlinks -Indexes
RewriteEngine On
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Although Yahoo is used as search engine much less than Google, it should not be omitted. Unlike the Google sitemap, where we created xml file, in this case we create a simple text file with list of all indexed-to-be URLs. (This file could be used instead of the regular Google sitemap but NOT recommended).

Now, open your favorite text editor and paste the bolded code bellow:

<?

// Connecting, selecting database
$link = mysql_connect(’localhost’, ‘db_username’, ‘db_pass’)
//db_username is the database username; db_pass is the database password
or die(’Could not connect: ‘ . mysql_error());
mysql_select_db(’data_base_name’) or die(’Could not select database’);
//data_base_name is the DB you connect to

// Performing SQL query
$query = ‘SELECT item_id FROM db_table_name WHERE some_condition=1′;
$result = mysql_query($query) or die(’Query failed: ‘ . mysql_error());
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