[high]Copyright:[/high] You may use this modification at your own risk. I cannot and will not be held responsible for any damage you may cause to your forums during installation or thereafter. You may not distribute this modification in whole or parts and anyone found doing so faces risk of prosecution. All my modifications are released at vBulletin.org and anyone found releasing them elsewhere also faces risk of prosecution. You may not translate this modification without my prior permission.
[high]Donations:[/high] I release my modifications for free. If you wish to donate please contact me and I will give you my details. All donations are graciously appreciated.
What does this modification do?
This modification will allow you to automatically have more search engine friendly URLs in your vBulletin. A forum which would normally display as forumdisplay?f=1 will now appear as f1-forumtitle.html and the same with threads. Having keywords in your URL can be of an advantage in search-engine ranking.
Requirements:
You must have mod_rewrite apache module enabled on your server. Contact your host for more information.
This will not work well for non-english boards as it strips most non-alpha numeric characters. E.g. ? would be stripped on french boards etc
Installation
1/
Please read the readme.txt file included in the zip for details on how to install this modification.
Please Click Install!
If you installed this modifcation please click the install button. It'll help you keep up to date with future releases and important bugfixes, security updates.
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I really like this, Dean, but I am guessing that I would loose all 350,000+ of the links I have in Google when it notices the change of the URL's, correct?
If so, puts me in a hard place.. When we upgraded to vb3 we lost all of our links (was using a url hack that was different than the standard in v3) and it took a good 9 months to get back to where we were.
Again, any way around this if it is going to be a problem?
Thanks,
David
is it possible to modify this extension so it only works with specified forums? Because I have a seperate forum for Articles and Tutorials, and would like that to use this, and not my main forum
I really like this, Dean, but I am guessing that I would loose all 350,000+ of the links I have in Google when it notices the change of the URL's, correct?
If so, puts me in a hard place.. When we upgraded to vb3 we lost all of our links (was using a url hack that was different than the standard in v3) and it took a good 9 months to get back to where we were.
Again, any way around this if it is going to be a problem?
Thanks,
David
The original URLs will still work. My only concern would be that Google might see the two urls - the original and the rewritten one - as duplicate content. I don't believe Google penalizes for duplicate content on the same domain, though. With their everchanging algorithm, it's hard to say.
Oops, I just noticed where you said you were using a different rewrite hack. In that case, I have no idea what the effect of using this might be. You could probably modify this extension so that the urls are rewritten using the same rewrite rules, thus not changing any of the urls, but I have no idea how to go about doing that.