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

[Erwin]

Works fine for me. Are you surfing through AOL? The latest AOL browser has some session problems with vB. Make sure you are using vB 2.2.8

[Paul]

Hi Erwin,

I narrowed down this problem to the sessions.php PPN posted in the sticky over on vbulletin.com's troubleshooting forum. Sorry, I forgot all about posting in this thread I was just too happy to realize I didn't break it

Thanks again,
Paul

[Paul]

The addition of the following code to postings.php will allow you to use the search-engine friendly URLs to merge threads:

Below:

PHP Code:

  // get other threadid
  $getthreadid=intval(substr($mergethreadurl,strpos($mergethreadurl,"threadid=")+9)); 


Insert:

PHP Code:

  // Hack: Work with search-engine friendly links
  $getsearchfriendlythreadid=intval(substr($mergethreadurl,strpos($mergethreadurl,"/t")+2));
  if ($getthreadid==0) {
    $getthreadid=$getsearchfriendlythreadid;
  }
  // End hack: Work with search-engine friendly links 


This will only work if your new url's contain "/t<threadnumber>". If you are using a different prefix, you'll need to alter the script accordingly, where the "2" equals the number of characters within the quotes. Also, if your forum resides in a directory that starts with the letter "t" this will not work for you. You'll need to modify it.

[Erwin]

I already modified my postings.php to do the same too, but I made it so that mods can just use the threadid number.

[dwh]

I could not get this to work no matter which way I tried...the rewrite doesn't work even though supposedly I have it installed....

Also, I am using /forums/

[The Piper]

I am having trouble with forumjump after installing this hack. Even if I have forumjump turned on on my control panel, it doesn't work. So I can't merge or move threads, for instance. Any thoughts on this issue?

[Thomas P]

Okay, my hoster finally told me, that I need a RewriteCondition statement on his servers (?) in order for rewrites to work.

Is there a standard RewriteCond I can use or do we poor .htaccess users need a special one for this hack?

[Dontom]

I installed this great hack - the day after a part of my forums & threads already were present in google
tom

[AWS]

Just to show this hack actually works and works well

[fello9]

Originally posted by The Piper
I am having trouble with forumjump after installing this hack. Even if I have forumjump turned on on my control panel, it doesn't work. So I can't merge or move threads, for instance. Any thoughts on this issue?

Any answer on how to fix this problem?