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

[jon2x]

<waffle>
just a thought....
by replacing:

<a href="showthread.php?s=$session[sessionhash]&threadid=$thread[threadid]">

with

<a href="$bburl/t$thread[threadid].html">

i believe you're preventing the sessionhash from being moved direct between pages?... does this affect users who aren't using cookies to track their sessionhash?

if two users with the same browser behind the same proxy and without cookies enabled try to access the site they might get strange things happening like posts being marked as read that they haven't seen etc....

if this is the case i don't think there's a way around it because passing the sessionhash in the path_info might cause spiders from different ips to register multiple copies of the same page...

sorry if i'm missing the point of sessionhash or the way this hack works aranoid:
</waffle>

[The Piper]

By reading your post I got kinda worried about this as well. But I just checked the "Who's Online" page on my site, and all of the pages are something like:

http://www.pinkfloydfan.net/t145.html?s=SESSIONHASH

So, apparently, the sessionhash is being passed through the new search-engine friendly page.

BTW, I just tried to update my online.php file with the instructions I found earlier (and posted on the compilation file before), but it didn't work. I was supposed to find this:

$loc=preg_replace("/?s=[a-z0-9]{32}(&)?/","?",$loc);

But only found this, on 2.2.6:

$loc=preg_replace("/\?s=[a-z0-9]{32}(&)?/","?",$loc);

I've tried adding

$loc=preg_replace("/(f)([0-9]+)(/)/","forumdisplay.php?forumid=\2",$loc);
$loc=preg_replace("/(t)([0-9]+)(.html)/","showthread.php?threadid=\2",$loc);
$loc=preg_replace("/&s=[a-z0-9]+/","",$loc);

but then I got lots of errors. No idea of what is going on....

[jon2x]

when i go to your site (http://www.pinkfloydfan.net/) none of the links on the frontpage are actually in the "spider friendly" format... how are the searchengine spiders working?

[The Piper]

Actually, some of them are in spider-friendly version. Some of them are not, YET, because of a few things: First, I want some of the forums to be shown ordered by Thread in ascendant order, so that can't be accomplished yet with spider-friendly URLS. Second, a few of the regular links (such as those "Comments" on every news) don't need to be SE optimized, because I have the link to the news forum in a SE friendly format, on the left menu.

[eva2000]

hi long time no see

i installed the hack and working fine but moving servers from RH 6.2 apache 1.3.26 to RH 7.3 1.3.26 i'm getting an error when i restart apache

i have in my virtualHost directive

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]

and get this error in restarting apache ?

Syntax error on line 1688 of /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf:
RewriteRule: cannot compile regular expression '^/f([0-9]+)/s([^/]+?)$'

my current forum urls are set as

http://animeboards.com/f1/s
http://animeboards.com/t42538/s.html

hoping you can help me