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]

got a demo/example url for us ?

[fastforward]

Originally posted by eva2000
got a demo/example url for us ?

http://dbforums.com

You can see the forum links on the front page are like :

http://dbforums.com/f5/s



and the threads are like:

http://dbforums.com/t44153/s.html

[Overgrow]

Hey very cool.. I haven't looked at the code yet, but nice job.

One note though: The main point of my hack is getting Google to the archives, not really friendly URLs.. that was just a sidenote. The archiving is what I'm after.

[eva2000]

yeah cool but do normal showthreads and forumdisplay urls still work ?

i.e would a url like http://animeboards.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=2 still work as well as

http://animeboards.com/f2/s ?

[fastforward]

Originally posted by eva2000
yeah cool but do normal showthreads and forumdisplay urls still work ?

i.e would a url like http://animeboards.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=2 still work as well as

http://animeboards.com/f2/s ?

hehe. Oh ye of little faith

Yeah they do.

The only urls that are trapped by the mod_rewrite directives are ones that match one of these three expressions:

^/f([0-9]+)/s([^/]+?)$
^/t([0-9]+)/s([^/]+?)\.html$
^/s([^/])+?/$

ie.
/f234/s or /f234/s345345detr3
/t2343/s.html or /t2343/s435345.html
/s/ or /s435345345dfsdf/

Actually I need to clarify in the docs that this assumes your forums are in the web root. Those directives should be prefixed with /forums/ or wherever if your vB is installed elsewhere.

[eva2000]

cool.. yet another hack i'm gonna add hehe

[eva2000]

oh wait any problems you can see running both overgrow's search engine spidering hack and yours together ? i also use htacess to use mod_rewrite to prevent hot linking of my forum images

[fastforward]

Originally posted by eva2000
oh wait any problems you can see running both overgrow's search engine spidering hack and yours together ? i also use htacess to use mod_rewrite to prevent hot linking of my forum images

No problems at all. I just installed Overgrows

http://dbforums.com/archive/

I did make one change to Overgrows though so that I wouldn't need to use .htaccess files. I deleted the .htaccess and added this to my httpd.conf:

RewriteRule ^/archive/.* /archive/index.php [L]

But either method will work.

[eva2000]

Originally posted by fastforward

No problems at all. I just installed Overgrows

http://dbforums.com/archive/

I did make one change to Overgrows though so that I wouldn't need to use .htaccess files. I deleted the .htaccess and added this to my httpd.conf:

RewriteRule ^/archive/.* /archive/index.php [L]

But either method will work.

okay great then

[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.