[jribz]

OK I have this installed and it seems to be working as described. When viewing who's online I can see the search engines looking at threads with url's similar to the following.

/archive/index.php/t-6044.html

When clicked by a human user they are redirected to

/showthread.php?t=6044

So I can only assume this works since all the spiders on the board are seeing the archived version, and when users click they are taken to the full version.

I do have a couple of questions however, since I am not too familiar with Google Sitemaps. Does the script automatically upload the sitemap to Google without any further action aside from making the Scheduled Task? I have made the task in the manager and run it (every day at 1AM), and it has created the files ( [xml] in forum root and specific [gz] forums in archive folder).

[upon further thinking, would I be correct in saying I need to let google know about the xml file in the root of the site?]

What is the affect on other search engines? I see yahoo, msn, ask, and others viewing similar archives, so I assume the affect is similar to what is happening with google, but they are not getting a map.

Last question, does this basically mean that other SEO hacks are not required, since the spiders will never see the rewritten urls anyhow?

Allot of assumptions up there. :ermm:

Oh and one last thing, I do use mod rewrite on my server for many sites, and have had no issues, but the command you say to enter to resolve the index.php issue seems to bog the server, making any urls that point directly to it, as in /index.php, not load. I suppose this could be a conflict within my htaccess file, but not too certain where to start looking. (however, I did try it with only the codes you provided (and RewriteEngine on) and have the same problem.

Thanks for your time and the hack.