One wonders whether Lumpy Burgertushie actually understands how the Web functions. [sigh] Having reasonably good search-engine placement is vital (for anything other than an invite-only resource with an exclusive membership who already know of your site after you tell them about it). If your website is intended for public use, then the primary way anyone is ever going to find it is via search engines, and people are generally not going to scroll through 15 pages of search results. Direct links to your site from others are, of course, another means of finding your site, but it generally takes a lot of human networking and quid pro quo to get that to happen in sizeable quantity.
As a real-world example, I run a family-history site with an embedded board. The surnames it is for are fairly obscure, so someone searching for one of those would run into my site – even with no SEO efforts on my part – within the first 3 pages of search results, in any search engine. But this is not nearly good enough, because the average user will give up and click away to something else by the end of the first page of search results (too often after just the first screenfull of results on that page, without scrolling). For something like this, the list of search hits is "poisoned" by Wikipedia having a stub article about the name, various copy-cat sites that regurgitate Wikipedia content taking up other slots, and a whole slew of heraldry and genealogy product/service vendors, who aggressively SEO-ize for every imaginable surname, pushing themselves toward the top of the list, and individuals by the surname who have also SEO-ized their social-media profile or their business. Yet my site has orders of magnitude more pertinent information for anyone searching for that surname, or one of its variants, than all of those dreck sites combined can provide. It's important for my project and for the end-user target audience that I take whatever SEO steps I reasonably can to boost my site's search-engine rankings. That has a great deal to do with the metadata emitted by site's pages, and also with getting other sites to link to mine, and even factors relating to the titling and content in the pages; but a properly constructed robots.txt is also a part of that effort.
While it's correct that robots.txt has limited utility with phpBB in and of itself, a given phpBB installation may be part of a larger site, and any phpBB with various extensions can produce a number of static or semi-static pages, so a sitemap (including forum names if one commits to keeping it updated) may be useful. So might also various SEO-related plugins, especially if you want to drive traffic to particular pages (e.g. FAQs or other documentary material in your board that is essentially static in nature).
PS: Note that ad revenue and sales play no part in any of the above. Lumpy Burgertushie's idea that SEO is simply for revenue-generation is, well, wrong.
As a real-world example, I run a family-history site with an embedded board. The surnames it is for are fairly obscure, so someone searching for one of those would run into my site – even with no SEO efforts on my part – within the first 3 pages of search results, in any search engine. But this is not nearly good enough, because the average user will give up and click away to something else by the end of the first page of search results (too often after just the first screenfull of results on that page, without scrolling). For something like this, the list of search hits is "poisoned" by Wikipedia having a stub article about the name, various copy-cat sites that regurgitate Wikipedia content taking up other slots, and a whole slew of heraldry and genealogy product/service vendors, who aggressively SEO-ize for every imaginable surname, pushing themselves toward the top of the list, and individuals by the surname who have also SEO-ized their social-media profile or their business. Yet my site has orders of magnitude more pertinent information for anyone searching for that surname, or one of its variants, than all of those dreck sites combined can provide. It's important for my project and for the end-user target audience that I take whatever SEO steps I reasonably can to boost my site's search-engine rankings. That has a great deal to do with the metadata emitted by site's pages, and also with getting other sites to link to mine, and even factors relating to the titling and content in the pages; but a properly constructed robots.txt is also a part of that effort.
While it's correct that robots.txt has limited utility with phpBB in and of itself, a given phpBB installation may be part of a larger site, and any phpBB with various extensions can produce a number of static or semi-static pages, so a sitemap (including forum names if one commits to keeping it updated) may be useful. So might also various SEO-related plugins, especially if you want to drive traffic to particular pages (e.g. FAQs or other documentary material in your board that is essentially static in nature).
PS: Note that ad revenue and sales play no part in any of the above. Lumpy Burgertushie's idea that SEO is simply for revenue-generation is, well, wrong.
Statistics: Posted by SMcCandlish — Thu Dec 19, 2024 9:17 pm