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]

okay i already have mod_rewrite so what do i do for the first step something like this ?

<VirtualHost 157.238.46.185>
ServerAdmin webmaster@animeboards.net
DocumentRoot /home/usr1/public_html
BytesLog domlogs/animeboards.net-bytes_log
ServerName www.animeboards.net
ServerAlias animeboards.com *.animeboards.com
CustomLog domlogs/animeboards.net combined
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /home/usr1/public_html/cgi-bin/
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/f([0-9]+)/s([^/]+?)$ /forumdisplay.php?forumid=$1&s=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^/t([0-9]+)/s([^/]+?)\.html$ /showthread.php?threadid=$1&s=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^/s([^/])+?/$ /index.php?s=$1 [L]
</VirtualHost>

[fastforward]

That's correct as long as your foums are in the web root. If not, you need to change those to something like:

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

[eva2000]

okay gonna implement this now hehe

[eva2000]

okay installed one problem i sthe showthread links for

Go to first unread post go to

http://animeboards.com/# now
also

Admin options for

split

merge

move

stick/unstick threads all don't work

as well as view mod queue, view attachment queue etc

they are redirect to my front page since i have an htaccess for error redirects to my front page

[fastforward]

Originally posted by eva2000
okay installed one problem i sthe showthread links for

Go to first unread post go to

http://animeboards.com/# now

Not sure what you mean here.

also

Admin options for

split

merge

move

stick/unstick threads all don't work

as well as view mod queue, view attachment queue etc

they are redirect to my front page since i have an htaccess for error redirects to my front page

I really can't see how the changes could in anyway affect these. You did only change the links in the forumhome and forumdisplay templates right?

The links you're talking about don't even point to pages that use these templates. they are still in their original form and point to postings.php.

[eva2000]

Originally posted by fastforward

Not sure what you mean here.

I really can't see how the changes could in anyway affect these. You did only change the links in the forumhome and forumdisplay templates right?

The links you're talking about don't even point to pages that use these templates. they are still in their original form and point to postings.php.

well i'm using the drop downmenu version of the admin options

for the other problem i.e.

this thread the link to

http://vbulletin.com/forum/showthrea...114233#newpost

goes to

http://vbulletin.com/forum/# on my forum

[fastforward]

Show me the Rewrite directives you put in your httpd.conf.

And what's this admin drop down options thingy you're talking about?

And the only templates changed were the ones in the instructions. One occurance in each template?

[eva2000]

okay i fixed the goto new or unread thread link by editing the showthread_firstunread template

<a href="showthread.php?s=$session[sessionhash]&threadid=$threadid$newpostlink">Go to first unread post</a> <a href="showthread.php?s=$session[sessionhash]&threadid=$threadid$newpostlink"><img src="{imagesfolder}/firstnew.gif" border="0" alt="first unread" align="absmiddle"></a>

but it seems the admin options drop down menu takes the relavtive url of the thread

so if it's

http://animeboards.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18752

it will work but

http://animeboards.com/t18752/s.html will

look for

http://animeboards.com/t18752/s.html/postings.php or something

[eva2000]

these

[fastforward]

Did you put the baseurl tag in the header template. That should stop those errors. You may need to alter it slightly to reflect your forum directory.

What is this drop down admin menu? Is it with the new templates? I still need to revert some of mine from RC3.