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

[etom]

slinky: what is Your definition of 'here'

[slinky]

I'm not sure if something here is upsetting you. If you want help with problems that you are having, you need to clearly explain what your problems are. It will probably be more helpful in troubleshooting to provide an explanation rather than just a reference to your site.

[Admin]

Just installed this here, seems to be working great.

[fastforward]

Originally posted by FireFly
Just installed this here, seems to be working great.

Not quite... The 'who installed this hack' link isn't working. You'll need to either but bburl or a slash in front of the url. I'm guessing that's probably inside the javascript. The 'base href' in the header doesn't seem to fix everything.

EDIT:
Forget it... Either you just fixed it or there be gremlins on this here site

[AWS]

I installed this and get 400 bad request errors. If I use the rewrite rule from the zip I get 500 error and in error log it says it can't parse regex. I used the modified rules and then I get 400 error. Anyone know what the problem might be?

[leebo]

Any chance of getting it converted to the autohack ( vbhacker )

Thanks

[Thomas P]

Hi there,

I'm trying this the 'n'th time now, meanwhile I switched hosters 3
times and all of them support mod_rewrite.
Nothing ever worked for me, am I that lame? I think so...

I use

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^f([0-9]+)/?$ forumdisplay.php?forumid=$1&s=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^t([0-9]+)\.html$ showthread.php?threadid=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^t([0-9]+)-([0-9]+)\.html$ showthread.php?threadid=$1&perpage=15&pagenumber=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^f([0-9]+)-([0-9]+)/$ forumdisplay.php?forumid=$1&daysprune=1000&sortorder=&sortfield=lastpost&perpage=40&pagenumber=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^[ft]([0-9]+)/s([^/]*)/(.+)$ /$3 [L]

in an .htaccess-file in my forum-directory where all
the vB-files reside.

After placing the htaccess-file i should be able to browse my board by typing in
something like http://mcseboard.de/f3 which should get me
http://www.mcseboard.de/forumdisplay.php?&forumid=3 - it doesn't

What's wrong here?
Thanks for any hint,
-Tom

P.S.: My URL isn't domain.com/forum but straight domain.com
That's the only difference I can see to a standard vB installation.

[mano1.com]

what is the latest version of this hack? There are so many posts I am not sure if I'd be up to date downloading the original file posted.

Thanks for letting me know

[Kyle_TX]

I want to install this, however I have a quick question.

Is this going to affect my current search engine listings?

[The Piper]

I compiled all the information regarding spider friendly URLs using .htaccess into one file, since a lot of people (including myself) were feeling a bit lost.

Please notice I do NOT claim any authorship on anything here. I merely copied a lot of information from a lot of threads into one file.

There may be errors, so I don't guarantee anything. You are using this on your own risk. It's working at my site, so I hope it works for you. One last thing, since I didn't create any of this, I won't be supporting anything, because I'm a newbie and I don't have much time. Just thought I'd contribute with my 2 cents.

Many thanks to all the people who helped me make this work on my site.

Shine on!
Paulo