search engine friendly hack

[Webb2002]

Hi there,

I posted at vbulletin.com and was advised to come here for a solution to a pre sales question. Here was my original question...

"I'm about to launch my webpromotion website using phpbb. Its a good forum, but it seems to have one major drawback. You can not make the forum pages search engine friendly :-/
By that I mean the url is flattened so that the "?" and "&" and other special characters are removed from the url. thisis inoportant as only one search engine can index them properly and that is google. Even google will not perform a deep crawl with them meaning only those pages with such query strings will be indexed IF the linking poge is NOT a dynamic url.

I don't want to go too deep as it gets a tad technical. I was advised on the phpforum to rewrie mods etc.

Anyway, i came across this excellent VB forum today...

http://www.visualbasicforum.com

The urls are flattened and the result of this is that no less than 1,380 postings are indexed in Google (!!). http://www.google.com/search?q=site:...8&start=0&sa=N


FYI this domain has 184 pages indexed http://www.google.com/search?q=site:...8&start=0&sa=N

[this forum btw has 19 http://www.google.com/search?q=site:...8&start=0&sa=N ]

Most fo which are non dynamic although some dynamic pages are indexed. thes are most likely those linked from .html pages.

So the long and short of it is. if VB2/3 can EASILY do what visualbasicforum has done then I will deleting phpbb and you got yourself a customer.

BTW, the forum in question is http://www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/foren/index.php

It will be a German language forum theme web promotion.
"

I found a couple of hacks but the one I'm looking for is the one where the urls are flattened and has nothing to do with archiving. Sorry I forgot the name of the poster and exact name of the hack. I tried to ask a question but was denied access to the forum so hopefully poosting it here will help.

How can I tell if my server or I have mod_rewrite capability?

Also is this the same hack visualbasicforum.com is using?

Thanks for your reply in advance.