Will Olympus be search-engine friendly?

[luchtzak]

Question that I have is that the new Olympus will be search engine friendly? Will the topics be indexed properly and will we have high results in e.g. google and yahoo ?

I use the .htaccess mod on my phpbb 2.0.20 forum and this works great, will a same system be created for this new forum?

thanks, kind regards,

Bart

[nuclear_eclipse]

I don't think it has that ability by default. You'd most likely need a mod of some sort to get it to reformat all of the links in the system, which would be a major undertaking.

There was a rather large thread somewhere on here about SEO, but I'm not sure where it went. The general consensus though was that modern SE's don't really need things to be in friendly, human-readable formats. So you shouldn't be worrying about those types of links unless you're really concerned about making it easier for your readers.

[SHS`]

Question that I have is that the new Olympus will be search engine friendly? Will the topics be indexed properly and will we have high results in e.g. google and yahoo ?

I use the .htaccess mod on my phpbb 2.0.20 forum and this works great, will a same system be created for this new forum?

thanks, kind regards,

Bart

Go on... guess:

In total there are 133 users online :: 27 Registered, 2 Hidden and 104 Guests
Most users ever online was 1320 on 07 Mar 2005 22:05

Registered Users: blipbloup, Doozen, eoinoc333, Googlebot, Graham, jojobarjo32, js666, LEW21, luchtzak, Lurttinen, mant3ra, Matraf, MSNbot, naderman, Nanci, nuclear_eclipse, oel, paulus, poyntesm, SHS`, spambot, Stelminator, TasDevil, the_dan, VinDuv, yossa, _Kilian_

I don't think it has that ability by default. You'd most likely need a mod of some sort to get it to reformat all of the links in the system, which would be a major undertaking.

There was a rather large thread somewhere on here about SEO, but I'm not sure where it went. The general consensus though was that modern SE's don't really need things to be in friendly, human-readable formats. So you shouldn't be worrying about those types of links unless you're really concerned about making it easier for your readers.

phpBB3 very much has the ability to allow search engines to index the contents of the forum, as it's more a session id in the URI issue, than the problem of dynamically generated URIs.

"Friendly" URIs can be achieved without touching phpBB code anyway, just requires slightly more advanced mod_rewrite kung-fu, e.g.:

Code: Select all

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \ /phpBB/viewforum.php?sid=(.*)&f=([0-9]+)
RewriteRule .   /phpBB/forum-%2/?sid=%1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule /phpBB/forum-([0-9]+)/ /phpBB/viewforum.php?f=$1 [L,QSA]

The above hasn't been tested and is just for the general gist of things. Edit... 2nd try

[nuclear_eclipse]

Very true that the mod_rewrite part of friendly URIs is implemented without touching the code, but the issue with then having the board send you to those generated URI's is a whole different can of worms. Unless things have dramatically changed since the last time I looked at phpBB2 code, there would be a LOT of places in the code that you would have to change to get all the hyperlinks to redirect to friendly URIs. On top of that, you'd need to either start tracking URI slugs (WordPress term) for everylink ever generated so you dont generate the same URI for a different link, or you'd need to put the topic index into the URI slug as well to assure uniqueness, which in itself makes URIs 'less-friendly.'

However, if it were possible for Olympus to recognize bots and remove any 'sid=' stuff from the URI automatically, that would allow for the URIs to still be static enough for search engines to index everything perfectly well. It's at that point that, like I said before, mod_rewrite style URIs are more of a nicety for the human folks rather than for the search bots, and most likely won't improve your search engine ratings.

[DavidMJ]

Very true that the mod_rewrite part of friendly URIs is implemented without touching the code, but the issue with then having the board send you to those generated URI's is a whole different can of worms. Unless things have dramatically changed since the last time I looked at phpBB2 code, there would be a LOT of places in the code that you would have to change to get all the hyperlinks to redirect to friendly URIs. On top of that, you'd need to either start tracking URI slugs (WordPress term) for everylink ever generated so you dont generate the same URI for a different link, or you'd need to put the topic index into the URI slug as well to assure uniqueness, which in itself makes URIs 'less-friendly.'

However, if it were possible for Olympus to recognize bots and remove any 'sid=' stuff from the URI automatically, that would allow for the URIs to still be static enough for search engines to index everything perfectly well. It's at that point that, like I said before, mod_rewrite style URIs are more of a nicety for the human folks rather than for the search bots, and most likely won't improve your search engine ratings.

The template engine is an excellent place for a large amount of such trickery to happen. A smart fellow could simply do this magick to template variables that start with U_

[nuclear_eclipse]

The template engine is an excellent place for a large amount of such trickery to happen. A smart fellow could simply do this magick to template variables that start with U_

Hmm, I didn't realize the templating system was powerful enough to do that. But that makes things nice and easy, and unexpectedly simple by seperating link changes from core code. I'll certainly have to look into that, as I've always been a firm believer in links not having anything to do with the system behind them, so when I can, I always use friendly links.

[wintermute]

As Olympus recognizes Googlebot etc. I was assuming it was automatically leaving Googlebot without SID parameters.. Am I wrong? Will we need a mod to keep Googlebot from getting SIDs?

Many thanks..

[dhn]

As Olympus recognizes Googlebot etc. I was assuming it was automatically leaving Googlebot without SID parameters.. Am I wrong? Will we need a mod to keep Googlebot from getting SIDs?

Search engine bots will be handled like registered users. So there will be no SID for them.

[nuclear_eclipse]

if that's the way it's supposed to be, how come I still get a '?...' part to all my urls? won't that disrupt the search bots' linkings?

[Eelke]

DHN said there will not be session IDs in the URL for searchbots, not that there will be somekind of URL-rewriting to mask the use of GET-variables (i.e., don't mix up not including session IDs in the URL with doing away with GET URLs altogether).

GET variables in the URL (which is what everything behind the question mark is) are really not that much of a problem for searchbots (at least shouldn't be, and are not for the major ones). Think about it, why would it be? What's essentially the difference between http://mysite/viewtopic.php?t=1234" target="_blank and http://mysite/viewtopic.php/t/1234" target="_blank ? Just a few characters.

Where the trouble starts is if http://mysite/viewtopic.php?t=1234&sid=12345678" target="_blank points to a page containing information posted there by forum users one time, and the next time it points to a page saying "Invalid Session" (when the bot revisits to check, or possibly worse, when someone found your page through the search engine). Or, when the search engine gets to a certain piece of content through http://mysite/viewtopic.php?t=1234&sid=12345678" target="_blank one time, and gets to the exact same piece of content through http://mysite/viewtopic.php?t=1234&sid=87654321" target="_blank (a completely different URL, as far as the bot is concerned) the next (the content is penalized by having too many URLs pointing to it).

So, in short, keeping session IDs in the URL is a problem for search bots. Using GET-type variable passing is not.