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.