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

[Haakon]

Hello, has anyone else got problems with downloading the hack? My Gozilla only tries to download attachments.php which is 0kb

[RobAC]

Probably a stupid question, but where do you find the httpd.conf file? It's not listed in my directory that I can find. Is this hack something that will work on a hosted server?

If you're on a shared server then just put the commands in a .htaccess file.

[RobAC]

Where should the .htaccess file go? Forums directory?

Yes

[CoolaShacka]

Amazing Release.
Could pls. somebody post the endversion of it.

I've tryed a little bit arround, but is don't work for me.

Thank you in advance.

[RobAC]

How does this hack handle private forums?

[CoolaShacka]

@RobAC:

The Spiders are not registered on your Forums, ans they don't have the necessary permissons. They can not spider inside your private Forums. They can only spider in your public forums.

PS. I'm still waiting for the final release of this hack.

[RobAC]

I don't have a full understanding of how the overall permissions would work as it relates to search engine spiders etc.

I understand that the spiders are not "registered" on the forums, but if they "spider" the threads/forums, what is to prevent them from spidering the threads in a private forum?

[Haakon]

RobAc: The spiders visits the pages just the way we do. If we click the link to the private forum, then we will be presented with a password verification form; we don`t know it so we leave. This is the same with robots/spiders, they leave when they can`t go any further.