phpbb manipulating main sites keywords

[poppybaby]

Warriors-
I have a site that basically has 50 pages of content. In addition to the site I have a URL.com/phpbb-forum It is linked to the main site's front page.

I think it is creating a problem for my SEO because in the Webmaster tools the "keywords" section is showing many of the repeated words that occur with forums. This is suppressing the true content that I want to be relevant for the main URL.

Questions:
Is this really a problem for SEO?
Does Google give lots of credit to this portion of the Webmaster tool?
How can I stop this from happening, short of removing the forum?

Many thanks!

[almondj]

Inserting some canonical code into your includes/page_header.php can help mend any duplicate content. THIS IS FOR PHPBB2!

This is something I wrote up for a gaming site of mine.

Open includes/page_header.php

Insert the following code anywhere on the page:

PHP Code:

//Getting the current page for assign vars (canonical purposes)
//Remove the space in "$ VAR"

$ VAR = "http://DOMAIN.com/$ _SERVER[REQUEST_URI]";

if(preg_match("/viewforum.php/", )) {
$ VAR = "http://DOMAIN.com/viewforum.php?f=$ _GET[f]";
}

if(preg_match("/viewtopic.php/", )) {
$ VAR = "http://DOMAIN.com/viewtopic.php?t=$ _GET[t]";
} 


In the $template->assign_vars(array()); part of the page add the following code:

PHP Code:

'U_CANONICAL' => "$ VAR", 


Open templates/STYLE/overall_header.tpl

In the head section post the following:

<link rel="canonical" href="{U_CANONICAL}">

Hopefully that helps.

[poppybaby]

That took a lot of time for you to write out, thanks. I will give that a shot this weekend.
But did anyone see my other questions?
Is this really a problem for SEO?
Does Google give lots of credit to this portion of the Webmaster tool?
How can I stop this from happening, short of removing the forum?