bbPress SEO

bbPress is a lightweight and user-friendly plugin for WordPress that enables the creation and management of discussion forums. It seamlessly integrates with WordPress websites, allowing users to easily add a forum feature. With its flexibility, performance, and security features, bbPress is an ideal solution for building and engaging online communities. However, bbPress comes with some default settings that are not good for SEO, which I'll cover in this post.

bbPress SEO issues

The most important thing in bbPress SEO is that it indexes some pages, which should not be indexed such as:

• Topic tag: mostly redundant as they don't serve any purpose for grouping content.
• User profile: duplicated content as user topics are already indexed. This is like the author page in WordPress, and should not be indexed.
• Search results: obviously, since the search results page are very unique and temporary.

These pages serve no purpose for user search intent. Indexing them might cause your website to have bad URLs in the SERPs.

How to add noindex robots in bbPress

To hide these pages from SERPs, you'll need to add noindex to meta robots tag. Before that, you'll need a conditional function to check these pages:

function dbt_bbpress_noindex() {
    return bbp_is_topic_tag() || bbp_is_single_user() || bbp_is_user_home() || bbp_is_search() || bbp_is_search_results();
}

Then you need to hook into a WordPress SEO plugin to set these page noindexed. All popular WordPress SEO plugins have filters to help you do so. In this post, we'll do that for Slim SEO and Yoast SEO.

For Slim SEO:

add_filter( 'slim_seo_robots_index', function( $value ) {
    return dbt_bbpress_noindex() ? false : $value;
} );

For Yoast SEO:

add_filter( 'wpseo_robots_array', function( $robots ) {
    if ( dbt_bbpress_noindex() ) {
        $robots['index'] = 'noindex';
    }
    return $robots;
} );

Conclusion

Optimizing your bbPress forum for SEO is crucial for boosting visibility, attracting organic traffic, and fostering an active online community. Understanding the limits of bbPress and how it works can help you avoid simple SEO mistakes. By implementing the snippet above, you'll avoid to have redundant URLs in SERPs, and increase the quality of your existing URLs, e.g. the topics.