Question SEO concern: have I set this properly?

i am quite concerned with the seo structure of the kuena forum due to duplicate meta tags etc.... i have set the joomla/kuena "forum" menu item (automatically created) to no index,no follow however when viewing my page source it still says index,follow. i am just concerned that there will be tons of duplicate page meta tags & mess up my seo. could you shed your light on this?
i have done the following: (is this correct?)
1. set the "forum" menu item to no index,no follow
2. placed this in my robots.txt file Disallow: /forum/
3. inside the view.php file i changed all index,follow to noindex,nofollow located at this directory: libraries/kunena/view.php

to add to the above, i would love to be able to allow some indexing of the forum as there is a lot of quality content, but i am afraid of messing up our seo as we have worked very hard to get to where we are. so could you please advise as to how the seo would affect any site & if what i have done above is the correct solution so our seo does not get harmed in any way?
thank you

willtrd wrote: ... could you shed your light on this?

It may help if you shed some light on your circumstances. Did you see the message printed near the top of this page:

If you are having problems then, for your own benefit, it would save us all a lot of time if you would kindly post your configuration report when you ask for help from this forum. If you do not post your configuration report we will not ask you for it but you will probably not get your problem solved, either.

General background information: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

willtrd wrote: to add to the above, i would love to be able to allow some indexing of the forum ...

... like how? Can you give us an illustration of what kind of "indexing" you would like to do? This is a different question to the question you asked about SEO; it's probably better if you created a separate topic about this new issue.

here is my report: (please note i have removed company information)

Database collation check: The collation of your table fields are correct

Joomla! SEF: Enabled | Joomla! SEF rewrite: Disabled | FTP layer: Disabled |

This message contains confidential information

htaccess: Exists | PHP environment: Max execution time: 45 seconds | Max execution memory: 128M | Max file upload: 24M

Kunena menu details:

Warning: Spoiler!

ID	Name	Menutype	Link	Path
596	Forum	mainmenu	Itemid=645	kunena-2014-03-14
645	Forum	kunenamenu	view=home&defaultmenu=645	forum
646	Index	kunenamenu	view=category&layout=list&catid=0	forum/index
647	Recent Topics	kunenamenu	view=topics&mode=replies	forum/recent
648	New Topic	kunenamenu	view=topic&layout=create	forum/newtopic
649	No Replies	kunenamenu	view=topics&mode=noreplies	forum/noreplies
650	My Topics	kunenamenu	view=topics&layout=user&mode=default	forum/mylatest
651	Profile	kunenamenu	view=user	forum/profile
652	Help	kunenamenu	view=misc	forum/help
653	Search	kunenamenu	view=search	forum/search
597	Forum	mainmenu	view=home&defaultmenu=645	trading-forum

Joomla default template details : | author: | version: | creationdate:

Kunena default template details : Blue Eagle | author: Kunena Team | version: 3.0.5 | creationdate: 2014-03-09

Kunena version detailed: Kunena 3.0.5 | 2014-03-09 [ Invecchiato ]
| Kunena detailed configuration:

Warning: Spoiler!

Kunena config settings:
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| Kunena integration settings:

Warning: Spoiler!

Kunena - AlphaUserPoints Disabled
Kunena - Community Builder Enabled: access=1 login=1 activity=1 avatar=1 profile=1 private=0
Kunena - Gravatar Disabled
Kunena - JomSocial Disabled
Kunena - Joomla Enabled: access=1 login=1
Kunena - Kunena Enabled: avatar=1 profile=1
Kunena - UddeIM Disabled

| Joomla! detailed language files installed:

Warning: Spoiler!

Joomla! languages installed:
en-GB	English (United Kingdom)

Third-party components: CommunityBuilder 1.9.1

Third-party SEF components: None

Plugins: None

Modules: None

to add to this..... i am not experiencing issues as of yet because i just added your component. however i have gone through the pages & in my page source of each i can see that it is going to duplicate many meta tags which is going to cause issues for my seo. so i am trying to prevent that before it happens:) seo is very important to us so i want to do everything i can to make sure it doesnt negatively affect our site.
in addition, what i meant by some indexing.....i would prefer to have the forum indexed because it would help seo due to a lot of content posted regularly so if there is a way i can achieve that without any negative impact i would prefer that. but if not & it continues to produce duplicates then i would simply prefer to not index at all.
i have tried to go into the joomla menu's (forum, index, recent topics etc....) and add in the meta data & keywords but they do not show up in my page source so apparently it is not working for some reason?
thank you

This is only my personal opinion and I could be way off-base but allow me to state it and you can judge for yourself if this makes sense.

As far as I know, in the 5+ years that I have associated with this website here - www.kunena.org - which uses plain, ordinary, no-frills, nothing out-of-the-ordinary, unmodified, Joomla SEO - we don't have any of the kinds of problems that you're feeling anxious about.

Likewise, in all the websites that I run myself, I don't fiddle around in with SEO things; I leave them alone and they come home (sounds like a nursery rhyme, doesn't it?)

There are many topics on this site that raise "concerns" about follow/no-follow , META content , and a whole lot of other SEO stuff and there are as many opinions about what is right or wrong as there are topics on the subject.

willtrd wrote:

... i have gone through the pages ....

How did you do this? What tools, if any, did you use to "go through" (analyse, perhaps?) the pages?

willtrd wrote:

... i can see that it is going to duplicate many meta tags

Perhaps you can help me understand the specific problem here. What are the clues that suggest to you that problems may arise down the track?

willtrd wrote: i would prefer to have the forum indexed because it would help seo due to a lot of content posted regularly so if there is a way i can achieve that without any negative impact i would prefer that.

I am still unsure what you mean by having the forum "indexed". As I mentioned before, this seems off-topic to the original question which is about whether you have set things up properly.

willtrd wrote: i have tried to go into the joomla menu's (forum, index, recent topics etc....) and add in the meta data & keywords but they do not show up in my page source so apparently it is not working for some reason?

As I also mentioned earlier, we have had many discussions about this subject. Again could be wrong but, as far as I know, there is no means to add metadata and "keywords" to Kunena. The page descriptions used by the big search engines (e.g. Bing, Google) are automatically extracted when your website is crawled. As an example of this, why not try searching Google now for this topic (e.g. www.google.com.au/#q=kunena+forum+seo+co...is+properly&safe=off ) and look at the number one result from that search.

As I mentioned earlier, there are many topics in this forum relating to people's concerns about how to add extra META information . I don't believe it's possible.

For those who put their faith and confidence in 3rd-party SEO tools, I think the jury is split 20% in favour of those who think they're useful and 80% who think they're more trouble than Little Bo Peep had trying to manage her sheep. But, again, that's just my personal opinion.

sozzled wrote: How did you do this? What tools, if any, did you use to "go through" (analyse, perhaps?) the pages?

i just went to each individual page & reviewd the source of that page.
example: site url / right click / page source / see entire code

sozzled wrote: Perhaps you can help me understand the specific problem here. What are the clues that suggest to you that problems may arise down the track?

google & most all search engines will penalize you for duplicate meta tags & keyword stuffing. so if the forum pages are appearing to be duplicate meta information the search engines will see this as a negative & penalize our entire domain knocking ranking down.

my goal is to not let that happen. a very important note is that i have edited the meta description & keywords for the "index" menu item, therefor it should use that information for seo purposes just like any other article or menu item would. however it does not use it at all & is as if i never made any changes to it at all.
here is the actual source of the index page of the forum:
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<meta name="keywords" content="Categories">
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">
<meta name="description" content="Categories - Forum - English (United Kingdom)">
<meta name="generator" content="Joomla! - Open Source Content Management">
<title>Forum :: Category Index</title>

however in my joomla back end i have a completely different description, keywords & title so i dont know why they are not working. all other pages, articles, menu items etc.... work perfectly so why not the kuena menu items? if i could get them to work it would cut down on the duplicates at least for the main category pages.

now please see the following pages source: (the keywords are identical, of course i changed them in the below but they are the same because they are all using my global joomla configuration keywords.

New Topic:
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<meta name="keywords" content="mykeyword,mykeyword,mykeyword,mykeyword,
mykeyword,mykeyword,mykeyword">
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">
<meta name="description" content="Recent Discussions (1/1) - Forum - English (United Kingdom)">
<meta name="generator" content="Joomla! - Open Source Content Management">
<title>Forum :: Recent Discussions (1/1)</title>

Recent Topics:
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<meta name="keywords" content="mykeyword,mykeyword,mykeyword,mykeyword,
mykeyword,mykeyword,mykeyword">
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">
<meta name="description" content="Recent Discussions (1/1) - Forum - English (United Kingdom)">
<meta name="generator" content="Joomla! - Open Source Content Management">
<title>Forum :: Recent Discussions (1/1)</title>

What may be more useful, instead of trying to analyse your site, is for you to look at the pages here on this site ( www.kunena.org ) and see how things are done here. As far as we are aware, there is no penalisng effect from Google on this site as far as what they index in their search engine.

You can see the effect of what Google does with the pages on this site (and the ranking of th domain) if you search Google for this topic (as I showed in msg #7 of this topic). I cannot be certain that your site will be treated in the same way as this site is concerned but I can assure you that we are using "vanilla-flavoured" Joomla SEO to achieve the results.

sozzled wrote: I can assure you that we are using "vanilla-flavoured" Joomla SEO to achieve the results

oh yes, i didn't mean anything negative or that you were not using with good intensions. sometimes components do things to sites that are different from others & i have heard a lot about forums doing this. please dont take this as anything negative!
could you please address the meta information in the kuena menus? with the information being input into each menu item why would it not show on the page?
thank you