A couple of months ago, I noticed that IP.Board was starting to get a bit of a bad rap when it came to search engine optimisation. There were a lot of topics popping up on the forums asking how to improve things, and asking why IP.Board was not “ready” for SEO. I wrote a long and detailed post on the subject: IP.Board and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
However, I decided I’d also give them some advice to improve the product out of the box in a few areas I saw potential. I’ve been working with them for the past few weeks, and the results are starting to be implemented in the product. Here are a couple of the changes that are coming in IP.Board 3.1:
- Using appropriate HTTP status codes: When you encounter an error in IP.Board, it will now default to sending a “500 Internal Server Error” status. If the error is due to missing/deleted content, you’ll get a 404 error, and if it’s due to an authorization problem, you’ll get a 403 error. This should help the search engines better understand these pages and drop things from their indexes as appropriate.
- Improved alt attributes on images: As you may know, the HTML standard requires that all images have an alt tag, which means that a lot of web applications are littered with alt tags such as “icon”, or “image” – which do nothing to help for accessibility or SEO. IP.Board was no different. In 3.1, however, a lot of these alt tags have been updated to use useful descriptions that either describe what they represent, or the action they may be associated with.
- Social networking sharing: Whilst strictly not an SEO feature, another cool addition coming in IP.Board 3.1 that will help with both search and promotion, is the addition of “Share This” buttons in topics. The buttons will allow your members to share content from your forum on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, making it more easy to find for users and search engines alike.
… And there’s more to come. I for one am delighted to see IPS taking these important steps to cover some of the details that forum vendors typically forget. For full details, see the official blog post at the IPS Community Forums.
