search engine friendly URLs in a new way?
 

Ala simular to the "ebay style feedback system" kind-of thread. Now to the point... :)

Search engine friendly URLs are always wanted on forums. Why should your thousand of posts not be indexed in google, afterall? There are hacks here that give a search engine friendly "archive", and some mod_rewrite hacks.

I've yet to find a hack for the actual forums, and not some measly archive, that didn't require mod_rewrite and intensive POSIX knowledge. So, I've been playing around here and there with a modification of my own.

Demo:
http://www.cgshockforums.com/

The modification does require Apache ("lookback" feature of mod_mime in particular). I've only modified the showthread and forumdisplay templates to reflect the "cleaner" urls.

Why? A part of this system is also a customized robots.txt file. Googlebot (or any other cralwer that respects robots.txt) is only allowed to index the /go/ "folder" (as all other files are disallowed). Thus the search engine is only indexing the relevant pages :).

Additionally, the system works nicely by hiding the sessionhash depending on whether it is needed or not. Sessionhash is always hidden from search engine crawlers (defined in an array by HTTP_USER_AGENT in phpinclude template).

Comments? Ideas? Suggestions? :p

What about my hack?

Yours I believe is relying on mod_rewrite, no?

No, it's just a one-step modification.

Then, out of curiosity, how does yours work? Having a 404 php page which deciphers the request urls and makes proper include?

No, it just gets rid of the sessionhash which is all that stops Googlebot from going on an indexing frenzy.

True but what I was referring is having forumX.html opposed to forumdisplay.php?forumid=X and sme for showthread.

The idea though is that it shouldn't matter. Despite myth, Google will still index (some) dynamic URLs.

yeah filburt how did you manage to get WDF to have forumxx.html ?? im quit curious as to that :D

I just used mod_rewrite. Note though that my flat file rewriting also trashes the sessionhash in the process.

You should make it public and make all the url's correct too ;)

- miSt

Google indexes dynamic urls fine, as long as there is no session hash present. THe only issue is that, googlbot is programmed not to index too much dynamic urls, as to not overload your site. Generally I find that getting all pages indexes is more valuable then slightly higher load while the crawler is at work.

We use a slightly different approach.

Hop over to:
http://forums.htmlcenter.com/archived

Comments appreciated. :)

Till

I've tried this hack, and the session hash doesn't appear to be getting dropped by Google. For example, when I look at 64.68.87.55, which Samspade says is Google, the url it is displaying has the session hash in it.

mccollin, it's not in the true url though. The who's online page is not showing you the actual url. It is showing you what is in the session table.

Amy

Ah, so you think it is working even though who's online would indicate that it isn't. What about in the log files... they are showing the full session hash as well. How would I then know if it is working?