Other Changes
We strongly recommend you make the following changes to your board settings.
Firstly, you should set signature fields to be invisible to guests. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, signature fields create repeated text all the way down the page for each members posts, creating a potential duplicate content penalty with search engines. Secondly, this move will protect you from spammers adding scripts and links to signatures, as they will not be displayed to search engines. You will have effectively removed any point to people registering just to add links to their signatures.
Avatars. You should only allow avatar uploads to your own server (i.e. do not allow avatars to be linked to external servers) as we have had reports of spammers using this method to collect I.P. Addresses of your visitors. Not only that, your board will not be slowed down by problems on the external servers that those avatars are hosted on. Keep your avatars in house.
Meta Tags. IPB currently has no provision for writing unique meta tags for each topic page. We have decided not to use the description and keywords tags as these would be the same on every page and we believe this causes indexing problems. Major search engines are so good at using on page content these days, that it appears they can make good use of topic text in the results. We currently recommend against the use of description meta tags with IPB, until it is possible to create unique ones for each page.
Profiles. It is strongly recommended that you make member profiles visible to registered members only. This is to prevent useless profile pages being indexed and to protect you from spam registrations that are made simply to add a link to the spammers website, possibly linking your website to a bad neighbourhood. Note that profiles are excluded in our robots.txt file but this is an extra measure you should seriously consider.
URL Rewriting
There are a few modifications out there that allow you to rewrite URL's to more friendly looking URL's, with real words/text instead of ugly looking strings. After careful consideration and while acknowledging that there are limited benefits to this method, we actually choose not to rewrite URL's.
There are a couple of reasons for this. Modern search engines have no problem whatsoever in indexing standard IPB forum URL's. The only advantage to FURL's in SEO terms is the ability to put keywords in URL's but in our experience, this brings little reward and on page content and protection from duplicate content issues is far more important. In fact, adding a FURL system to your board could actually create even more URL's with the same content if you're not careful.
Note that we're not recommending against FURL rewriting, merely highlighting the fact that we chose against it and that you should use this method with extreme caution. However, future versions of IPB should see their own URL rewriting system, which would be great, as future support is guaranteed.