You must have noticed on your default Pligg installation whatever page you open, the title tags stay the same “Pligg Beta 9 ” (or the name of your site when you change it). This is not very Search Engine Friendly because the “page title tag element is still one of the most important factors for ranking highly in the search engines” so having the same title tag on every page would do you no good.

So here is a really simple hack that anyone can do and I have been using on all my Pligg sites and in free pligg templates offered here. This little hack will display Story titles on story pages, category names as titles on category pages and for all other pages whatever you name them in your Admin Panel (under » Admin » Modify Language) in PLIGG_Visual names. It will also reverse page titles putting your site name AFTER the page name which is also better for Search Engines. Here are some examples of this below.

Original Pligg Story Title
BuzzSEOjr.com | Most Important SEO Tips

SEO Friendly Pligg Story Title
Most Important SEO Tips | BuzzSEOjr.com

Now your most important keywords are at the front of the page title. Very SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY title don’t you think?

Here’s how to do it:

First open templates/templateName/pligg.tpl and FIND

<title>{if isset($pretitle)}{$pretitle}{/if}{#PLIGG_Visual_Name#}{if isset($posttitle)}{$posttitle}{/if}</title>

REPLACE WITH

{if $pagename eq "story" || $pagename eq "topusers" || $pagename eq "cloud" || $pagename eq "upcoming" || $pagename eq "live" || $pagename eq "submit"}
<title>{$posttitle|substr:3} | {#PLIGG_Visual_Name#}</title>
{elseif $pagename eq "search"}
<title>{$posttitle|substr:3} search results | {#PLIGG_Visual_Name#}</title>
{else}
<title>{#PLIGG_Visual_Name#} | {$pretitle|substr:22} {$posttitle|substr:3 }</title>
{/if}

That will take care of your main title tags. Now this Hack should take care of your h2 header tag on search page and it is optional.

Open templates/templateName/search_centre.tpl and FIND

{if isset($templatelite.get.search)}
<h2>{#PLIGG_Visual_Search_SearchResults#} {$templatelite.get.search|sanitize:2|stripslashes}</h2>
{/if}
{if isset($templatelite.get.q)}
<h2>{#PLIGG_Visual_Search_SearchResults#} {$templatelite.get.q|sanitize:2|stripslashes}</h2>
{/if}

REPLACE WITH

{if isset($templatelite.get.search)}
<h2>{#PLIGG_Visual_Search_SearchResults#} {$templatelite.get.search|sanitize:2|stripslashes} search results</h2>
{/if}
{if isset($templatelite.get.q)}
<h2>{#PLIGG_Visual_Search_SearchResults#} {$templatelite.get.q|sanitize:2|stripslashes} Search Results</h2>
{/if}

There is one more thing to do, go to your Admin Panel / Modify Language and filter for “Search results for”, remove both pieces of text by editing and deleting the text then clicking save leaving blank text fields.

Thats it, you’re done. You just created SEO Optimized Page Titles on your Pligg site.

Enjoy.

This will be the home page of SEOFox where you’ll be able to download it. Stay tuned.

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This will be the home page of JuipoMagazine where you’ll be able to download it. Stay tuned.

Download New Browner Free Pligg Template.

The robots.txt file will tell the search engine robots what pages on your blog or website should be crawled and indexed and you really don’t want them to index your admin files because there is no relevant content there so creating a simple robots.txt file can actually improve your website’s crawlability and overall SEO.

Here’s an example of Dupe content from a pligg website :

http://buzz.seojr.com/InternetMarketing/Most-Profitable-Adsense-Keywords-List/
http://buzz.seojr.com/story/title/Most-Profitable-Adsense-Keywords-List/

Both of those URLs  point to the same page and will be indexed by search engines and there goes the flag, so here is the fix.

1. Open your NotePad.

2. Copy the text below and paste it into the file.

# All robots will spider the domain
User-agent: *
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /3rdparty/
Disallow: /libs/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /internal/
Disallow: /backup/
Disallow: /thickbox/
Disallow: /api/
Disallow: /evb/
Disallow: /avatars/
Disallow: /admin_index.php
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /story.php
Disallow: /login.php
Disallow: /user.php
Disallow: /js/
Disallow: /img/
Disallow: /story/
Disallow: /story/title/

3. Save the file on your computer as robots.txt

4. Now upload the newly created robots.txt file to you pligg rott directory overwriting the existing file if there is one already.There you have it, no more duplicate content.  Read more on Robots.txt and SEO.

This template has a custom links block in top left corner that is easily edited to add your own links without editing pligg code. We have added optional FeedBurner feed button but if you don’t use feedburner, you can easily convert back to original feed without messing with the code. This template also has changed Bookmark Pligg To FaceBook Bookmark URL and Image and added StumbleUpon and Technorati Bookmark URLs and Images.

Template Features:

Browner1 features editable links block, image as a logo, SEO Friendly Page Titles Hack, Duplicate Content fix, Delete Discarded Stories, Changed Bookmark Pligg To FaceBook Bookmark URL and Image, Added StumbleUpon and Technorati Bookmark URL and Image, Added FeedBurner feed button (optional). Minimum height in IE fix.

Here is the image:

::Demo

DOWNLOAD Browner1_v_9.8.zip

Installation:

——–
1. upload whole browner1 folder to /templates/ folder to your pligg root folder.

2. Goto you administration section and set the template name to “browner1″.

3. Upload images from Avatars folder to Avatars folder in your Pligg installation.

4.clear your /templates_c and /cache folders.
———

1.SEO friendly titles Fix
This is already coded in pligg.tpl template included in the download.

2.Pligg Duplicate Content fix
Pligg story pages have a few URL’s that can be indexed by the search engines and could amount to duplicate content so we have included a Pligg robots.txt file that will fix that.

Just upload robots.txt from Extras/SEO package/ folder to the root folder of your server (where your pligg is installed).

3. Custom Logo Image.

To change the logo with your own, create your new logo and save it as logo.jpg and upload it to …templates/browner1/images/ folder on your server. Make sure the logo is 237px wide and 74px high (237×74). Alternatively you can change the image type (jpg,gif,…) in main.css under #logo.

4.Delete Discarded stories.Our templates come with already coded link to delete discarded stories in dashboard. If your website is in main folder (like http://www.pligg.com) all you have to do is upload admin_delete_stories.php and admin_optimize_database.php from Extras/ to the root folder of your server (where your pligg is installed).

If Pligg is installed in a subfolder, (like http://www.pligg.com/news/) then use files from Extras/Subfolder package/ folder and upload admin_links_center.tpl to …templates/browner1/admin_templates/ folder on your server replacing the existing file and admin_delete_stories.php and admin_optimize_database.php to the root folder of your server (where your pligg is installed).
(Thanks to fingerprn at http://forums.pligg.com/pligg-mods/10089-method-deleting-discarded-stories.html for this hack).

5.FeedBurner button Configuration:

Custom template file will let you use Feedburner or regular feeds.

6.Protect tpl files

When you install Pligg inside the /template folder you will see a file titled htaccess.default, rename this file to .htaccess to protect your templates directory from being browsed. It is also good idea to copy this file to all your template directories for example if you are using yget as your template place a copy of the .htaccess file within every folder of your pligg template.

This method will return a 403 Forbidden error for anyone that tries to browse your templates folders or open one of your .tpl files directly.

Custom Link block and Feedburner customization are explained in the Readme file included with the download.

Any issues, leave a comment bellow.

UPDATE: New Search Box and Minimum height in IE fix added.

Very soon we’ll start uploading free templates for download.