I noticed a not-so-SEO-friendly situation with dew-newPHPlinks. Many of the meta descriptions / meta keywords are almost identical, or in the case of owner.html and review.html they are identical. This is not very helpful to people looking through search engine results. As such, I've hacked the code to display some different meta data for different pages, and where (at the moment) it is impractical to add decent meta data I have opted to remove it entirely and let Google et al create their own snippets.

Also, to get rid of what are essentially junk pages from SERPs I have added a robots meta tag of "noindex, follow" (e.g. lost.html - there is no reason to have this indexed by a search engine!).

Now, if there is an elegant way to grab a category description at the time the page header is written (on category pages) then it would be a nice idea to dump the first 128 or so characters into the meta description tag. Likewise, I think echoing the category description before the site listings would add a small bonus for engines such as Google which don't like pages that are simply a collection of likes. This means a little more 'setup' is required by webmasters when building categories, but getting a higher SERP placing is also important.

Anyone interested in the code I've hacked together, please let me know and I will post it (it is all basically a mod to the main 'directory' script.

Cheers,
Graeme

Which version are you referring to ? 2.01 or 2.1 ?

2.1 does have basic dynamic title and meta tags. Regardless the directory file should still be edited to customize the static portions.

I am using v.2.1.0.1b SEF. There are a few problems I see from an SEO point of view (not that I'm an expert - more lucky I have a few pages and site that perform well for niche markets!).

I don't like the fact that Google indexes the out.php files... but that's more a glitch of Google than any particular coding practice (I have the same 'problem' for a topsite script I cobbled together).

For an example of the duplicate output I am trying to avoid see:
http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=site%3Aspeakspanishlikeagringo.com%2Fdir%2Fdirectory%2Fadd.html

with duplicate title / description output:

Add Speak Spanish Like A Gringo Directory
Add Speak Spanish Like A Gringo Directory uses DewNewPHPLinks an open source directory script from Dew-Code.com.

and
http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=site%3Aspeakspanishlikeagringo.com%2Fdir%2Fdirectory%2Fowner.html

with duplicate title / description output:

Owner Speak Spanish Like A Gringo Directory
Owner Speak Spanish Like A Gringo Directory uses DewNewPHPLinks an open source directory script from Dew-Code.com.

I have adapted my the directory (php) script for one of my sites to add noindex to the owner.html and later will update the add.html to only index add.html and not have all the add.html?PID=xxx indexed.

For a while Google was heavily penalizing web/link directories, as so many had popped up just duplicating DMOZ (for e.g.). I think they still penalize, especially if a page is clear just a collection of links - hence I feel the need to add the directory description to each category page output.

Cheers,
Graeme

should probably add rel="nofollow" to the Edit links, which lead to the owner pages

In functions around line # 1255

Code:

$htmlsrc .= "&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class=\"ownerLink\" "; $htmlsrc .= "href=\"./directory/owner.html?";

you can just tuck your own line between them

Code:

$htmlsrc .= "&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class=\"ownerLink\" "; $htmlsrc .= "rel=\"nofollow\" "; $htmlsrc .= "href=\"./directory/owner.html?";

And agreed, anything you can do to set your installation of the script apart from the rest is a good thing. Sort of the whole purpose of this site, to convince people that they can use open source software and tweak to fit their needs. They just need to look under the hood.

Hi Graeme could you send me the code and where to put it. Thanks Phil

Sorry to be a complete dope here but what files are relevant to this issue, at the moment mine is not indexed at all, so trying to work out how to customise these things but cant work out which files you are talking about

Thanks

Jason