301 redirects?

ebnx · Joined: 01 Nov 2007 Posts: 21

Hello:

Thanks very much for the advanced rewrite mod. I'm running a phpBB 2.0.19 forum and I'd like to improve my URL structures to be more SEO friendly.

I had two questions:

Does this mod allow for 301 redirects of my old dynamic URLs to the new SEO friendly URLs? I didn't see (or understand) this when examining the modifications for the htaccess file. Just to cite an example

Let's say a user typed in an old URL as:

http://www.forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=6480

would this be 301 redirected to the new SEO-friendly URL, like:

http://www.forum.com/seo-friendly-url.html

Also--is the zero dupes mod necessary to install as well? I don't want to be penalized for duplicate content, but if I can avoid adding another mod to my forum that would be ideal.

Thanks very much for your feedback!

ebnx · Joined: 01 Nov 2007 Posts: 21

One additional follow up: can we achieve the same effect as the zero duplicate mod by adjusting the robots.txt file to prevent bots from reading the dynamic versions of my URLs?

Sorry for the newbie questions... Embarassed

dcz · Posted: Sat Nov 03, 2007 2:49 pm Post subject: Re: 301 redirects?

Not really, you'll need the zero duplicate to have the old links redirected, the robots.txt is only enough to prevent indexing.

Redirecting will make the migrating faster and more efficient, the previously indexed url will be updated instead of being deleted from Google index.

Just like if only the url had changed and not like if a new pages was created while the older one was dropped.

Example : http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=43

Wink

++

ebnx · Joined: 01 Nov 2007 Posts: 21

Thanks for the clarification Smile