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

[Ogmuk]

Thanks! I didn't even think about excluding the placeholding banners to raise the clickthrough percentage. Simple but great javascript.

[lierduh]

07-17-03 at 06:27 AM buro9 said this in Post #270
Just checked, and lierduh you also suffer from this bug... so I'll assume that everyone who has done this also suffers from it.

The change I've made isn't aesthetically pleasing, but it does work and stays true to the spider friendly purpose.

To summarise to those joining the end of this thread and wondering where to begin:

First, follow fastforward's instructions on the first page of this thread... you need to do this before anything else to be familiar with what is going on before it gets scarier:

...
.

buro9, I have edited my original post to include a link pointing to your post.

I might start to look into fixing the bugs you pointed out, only problem (or not for some) is the VB3 is around the corner...

[PurpleCow]

If my forums are installed in a subdomain say http://forums.mydomaindomain.com and not the root or a subdirectory like this http://www.mydomain.com/forums , how do i proceed ??

Any special changes to be made ??

Thanks

[lierduh]

Today at 01:34 AM HostBubble said this in Post #283
If my forums are installed in a subdomain say http://forums.mydomaindomain.com and not the root or a subdirectory like this http://www.mydomain.com/forums , how do i proceed ??

Any special changes to be made ??

Thanks

Looks like you have not RTFM.

[heynurse]

What an awesome hack and additional features added! Great job.

I was just thinking, would it be beneficial to your search engine listing to have maybe a keyword in the file name? For example instead of

http://yoursite.com/t24232.html

it could be something like:
http://yoursite.com/XXXXXXX-24232.html (replace XXXX with any keyword you wish.

I'm not too sure how beneficial this might be for rankings, but I've seen it mentioned several times that having keywords in file names is better for rankings? Would this be hard to do or practical? Do you think it would be beneficial?

Or maybe even pulling in the title of the thread into the file name?

Maybe I'm totally off base here and don't have a clue of what I'm talking about If so, just tell me so.

[Till]

RewriteRule: cannot compile regular expression '^/f([0-9]+)/s([^/]+?)$'

Is all I get. Does that mean I am missing regex support in my mod_rewrite?

[Till]

Nevermind, if anyone is looking for a fix:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...131#post190131



Could someone (ehem, moderators) edit this and put the link to the post in the first post?

[iceman11111]

Ok, I have everything working but I have 1 question?

If you goto this thread:
http://www.intense-training.com/forums/t3457.html

and then goto the top of the page and click "General Discussion Board"

it goes to
http://www.intense-training.com/foru...hp3?forumid=12

instead of
http://www.intense-training.com/forums/f12.html


How can I fix that?

[iceman11111]

bump for help!

[buro9]

You can only resolve that by editing the PHP code.

Most of the links that are constructed use the templates... which you've already adjusted... but some use the PHP functions to generate the links... such as the pagination and bread crumb navigation bits.

I don't recall the precise change I did to have mine working... but you can emulate what I did by simply searching all of your PHP files for "forumdisplay" and then making the judgement call as to whether you should change that instance of it.

I think you're likely to find that bit in admin/functions.php though