Desperately need search engines to index - New Spider Friendly?
 

I know that Overgrow created Spiderfriendly URLs and that someone else was making an attempt with the Cannon hack, but I would really like to get my forum's contents indexed by google and other search engines. I still have virtual hosting and it is my understanding that this hack cannot be implemented correctly with the access that I have?
Regardless, I need a hack or solution to this. I don't have a lot of money but I would be willing to pay to get the site searchable and optimized. I don't have much experience with this so I am not sure exactly how to do this.
I am running 2.2.7

Thanks for your time,
David
david@pwcracer.com

Try fastforward's hack - do a search for it. It uses .htaccess, and gives your site spider-friendly URLs.

Overgrows is very simple... it does requrie .htaccess, but just cause your on a virtual host doesn't mean you can't use .htaccess... i'm on a virtual host and overgrows hack works good for me. Plus, overgrows hack allows every single thread / post on your entire forum to be spidered, where as, fasforward's will only get google to spider threads that were posted after you implment the hack (which isn't good if you have alot of posts). I just like overgrows much better cause it requires no mods of the database, no template mods and no file mods... you just upload the 3 files to a new directory and change a few variables around in them and it will draw the posts directly from the database. Also, since vb3 will be out soon, you don't want to hack up your board too bad and from what I understand, fastforward's hack is quite a bit more extensive than overgrows. To see a working version of overgrows hack on my board, visit http://www.battleforums.com/archive - Works good for me :)

Does this work with 2.2.8 ??

SkuZZy,
I don't get through with the link you left.. Is there a working version.

I took it down because google wasn't spidering it. I monitored google and it only visited the index page and didn't go any deeper. I'm assuming it was because of the 404 redirect it uses (google assumes that it's looking at a customized 404 error page). I'm now using Xenon's hack and you can see it at http://www.battleforums.com/history

Do you have a link to Xenon's hack? I may be having a stupid spell but I can't find it.. What's the hacks name name?

Thanks,
David