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

[tamarian]

I've installed this, with Byrons mods and it worked fine for many browsers, except Netscape 4.7. It doesn't download the images and show image coding errors.

I've removed it until I can find a work around. Any ideas?

[amykhar]

With auto's help, I got this installed and working on my board

My question is why doesn't it work if I use the sessionhash part of the url? If I strip that out, it works fine. With it, I get page not found.

(I am using .htaccess)

Amy

[amykhar]

Has anybody goes who's online straightened out to recognize these urls?

Amy

[eva2000]

Originally posted by amykhar
Has anybody goes who's online straightened out to recognize these urls?

Amy

not yet.. i just leave as is

[amykhar]

Originally posted by eva2000
not yet.. i just leave as is

rats. Looks like I have some work to do then huh?

Amy

[amykhar]

Ok. This is HIGHLY experimental, but I think I have who's online fixed.

In online.php find:

PHP Code:

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


add after:

PHP Code:

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


Thus far, it's working on my board. But I promise nothing.

Amy

[Haakon]

amykhar: I see that you`ve gotten the hack to work on threads that contain more pages. My additional pages in threads doesn`t respond to the hack.
The original code was:
RewriteRule ^t([0-9]+)-([0-9]+)\.html$ showthread.php?threadid=$1&perpage=15&pagenumber=$ 2 [L]

Could you please paste in the code you are using?

[amykhar]

I got mine from Auto

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]

Amy

[amykhar]

Yay! It seems to have worked. Google just spent a very long time crawling my board.

I still haven't gotten myself back to Netscape compatiblity though. Did anyone find a way to do it without requiring all the templates to be edited?

Amy

[eva2000]

my forum has 24,000 - 26,000 pages indexed by google