Spider friendly URLs

For vB 2.0

This little hackette is a quick fix to allow search engine bots to spider your threads.

Although this will allow the bots to index every thread on your site, it will not make the threads 'search engine optimized'. They will see exactly what you see when you visit your site. It simply removes the CGI bits from the URL's which prevents most search engine bots from spidering more than one level deep.

If you want a hack that allows to fully customize how the thread will look to the search engine bot, you should look at Overgrows more complete hack here.

The advantage of this hack over Overgrows is that it does not require htaccess support which can have performance issues. This could also be seen as a disadvantage though as my hack requires that you have mod_rewrite enabled on your Apache Server, whereas Overgrows method should work with just about any web host out there.

Take yer pick

[eva2000]

woah i had to edit nearly all of my templates

first important one

do a search template for the forum action part

<form action="

and you'll have to change them all to

<form action="/

otherwise, posting, replying, logging in and out and any forms won't work in netscape

only images i couldn't find the link to edit to add $bburl/ to are

$post[foldericon]

and the only link i can't seem to find to add $bburl/ to is in forumdisplaybit

$thread[postedby]

where is this ?

[fastforward]

I also had a problem with the bbcode smilies not showing up. I had to edit functions.php and add a slah before the href in this line:

$bbcode=str_replace(trim($smilie[smilietext]),"<img src=\"/$smilie[smiliepath]\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\">",$bbcode);

It's on or around line 362.

Not sure about the posted by link yet.

I wish I'd never thought of this hack now

[eva2000]

i fixed the smilies and posticon problem by adding a slash / in the edit smilies in the admin panel

also another problem

merging threads won't work with your shorter url

is it possible to show/display the real url in a small table on/under the thread or on the merge thread template

i.e. display something like please input the thread to merge in the format

http://animeboards.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=XXXX

where XXXX corresponds to

http://animeboards.com/tXXXX/s.html

[fastforward]

Originally posted by eva2000
i fixed the smilies and posticon problem by adding a slash / in the edit smilies in the admin panel

also another problem

merging threads won't work with your shorter url

is it possible to show/display the real url in a small table on/under the thread or on the merge thread template

i.e. display something like please input the thread to merge in the format

http://animeboards.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=XXXX

where XXXX corresponds to

http://animeboards.com/tXXXX/s.html

What we need is a little link that can be displayed on every page that whne clicked, will reload whatever page you happen to on using the original url. It should be possible with a seperate php script. However, I gotta wonder if it's really worth the hassle. I might just give it up and just use Overgrow's hack.

There must be an easier way than this. I'm going to spend a few hours reading the Apache docs. I can't believe it needs to be this hard.

[eva2000]

Originally posted by fastforward

What we need is a little link that can be displayed on every page that whne clicked, will reload whatever page you happen to on using the original url. It should be possible with a seperate php script. However, I gotta wonder if it's really worth the hassle. I might just give it up and just use Overgrow's hack.

There must be an easier way than this. I'm going to spend a few hours reading the Apache docs. I can't believe it needs to be this hard.

well for what it's worth.. google.com bot paid my forums and visit and i can see it running all the way through my forums especially with overgrow's hack but yours as well

[Porfiry]

I see that I'm digging up an old thread, but I have a solution to the problem discussed.

The answer is rewriting!

RewriteRule ^f([0-9]+)/s([^/]*)/$ /forumdisplay.php?forumid=$1&s=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^t([0-9]+)/s([^/]*)/thread\.html$ /showthread.php?threadid=$1&s=$2 [L]

RewriteRule ^[ft]([0-9]+)/s([^/]*)/(.+)$ /$3 [L]

I've modified the first 2 rules a bit to make things easier. The 3rd rule simply changes any URL like "/f1/s1/newreply.php" that would normally cause a problem and just rewrites it to "/newreply.php". This should also work for any images. No need to muck with templates.

[eva2000]

Originally posted by porfiry
I see that I'm digging up an old thread, but I have a solution to the problem discussed.

The answer is rewriting!

RewriteRule ^f([0-9]+)/s([^/]*)/$ /forumdisplay.php?forumid=$1&s=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^t([0-9]+)/s([^/]*)/thread\.html$ /showthread.php?threadid=$1&s=$2 [L]

RewriteRule ^[ft]([0-9]+)/s([^/]*)/(.+)$ /$3 [L]

I've modified the first 2 rules a bit to make things easier. The 3rd rule simply changes any URL like "/f1/s1/newreply.php" that sould normally cause a problem and just rewrites it to "/newreply.php". This should also work for any images. No need to muck with templates.

where were you when i added this hack

what i did for my subsequent styles was create replacement variables for form and other urls and it works but i'll try your method when an upgrade to the next release might force me to revert too many templates

[VirtueTech]

Eva check your PM's please

[fastforward]

Like eva2000, I also solved it the hard way

Although the form problems were happening in both IE and Netscape, Netscape also had a lot of other problems with normal links. Does this method work with Netscape?

I'll try it when 2.02 is released

[steven]

Originally posted by porfiry
I see that I'm digging up an old thread, but I have a solution to the problem discussed.

The answer is rewriting!

RewriteRule ^f([0-9]+)/s([^/]*)/$ /forumdisplay.php?forumid=$1&s=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^t([0-9]+)/s([^/]*)/thread\.html$ /showthread.php?threadid=$1&s=$2 [L]

RewriteRule ^[ft]([0-9]+)/s([^/]*)/(.+)$ /$3 [L]

I've modified the first 2 rules a bit to make things easier. The 3rd rule simply changes any URL like "/f1/s1/newreply.php" that sould normally cause a problem and just rewrites it to "/newreply.php". This should also work for any images. No need to muck with templates.

Sorry to bring up an old thread again, but I would like to use this hack on my board and had a couple of questions. I was wondering how I would change the above code to reflect my forums directory which is not run as root, but is run as http://www.mydomain.com/forums

Any Help is greatly appreciated.
Steven