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

[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

[LuBi]

Does the first post of this hack work? Or do I need to read through all thep ages and install fixes ti run this on 2.2.1? Thanks

[tamarian]

Eva, do you get complaints from Netscape users? I got a few from 3.x users so I removed the hack.

Might put it back again, and create a seperate template for Nutscape 3.x users, but if I can fix it, it would be much better.

[tamarian]

Originally posted by LuBi
Does the first post of this hack work? Or do I need to read through all thep ages and install fixes ti run this on 2.2.1? Thanks

I tried the one from this post, and it worked great.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...131#post190131

Only problem is for Netscape 3.x users, ifor those who care about them

[amykhar]

DAMMIT ALL TO HELL! Ventures online will be disabling mod rewrite on my server. Google FINALLY indexed me, and now the links aren't going to work.

They turned it off today for a while and killed my entire board.

Grrrrrrrr!

Amy

[LuBi]

Originally posted by tamarian


I tried the one from this post, and it worked great.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...131#post190131

Only problem is for Netscape 3.x users, ifor those who care about them

I really don't understand those instructions.. I need to make an .htsccess? Doesn't seem to difficult, and this would make my site very powerful compared to my competition so please help peoples I'm slow.

[tamarian]

Amy,

Would you please share your changes? Your forum handles Nutscape 4.x a lot better than mine.

Is it a baseref tag or specific replacements.......

TIA

[amykhar]

tamarian,
I have slowly been going into the templates and changing the urls from relative to absolute. However, I have barely gotten any done because of time constraints and a deep lack of motivation.

Now that it looks like Ventures Online is going to zap my mod_rewrite, I probably won't work on it anymore.

Amy

[tamarian]

Originally posted by amykhar
[B
Now that it looks like Ventures Online is going to zap my mod_rewrite, I probably won't work on it anymore.
[/B]

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No affiliation, just a happy customer.

[Silviu]

Any Win2k/IIS version for this hack ?

[chaz7979]

Can't most spiders read the ? mark links now anyway?