How do I prevent topic title edition?

chestnut · Joined: 09 Oct 2007 Posts: 3

Hello, thanks for a great mod.

But I have a question. Should the user/ a mod edit the topic title, using adavanced mod rewrite, wouldnt the URL be changed to something else and lead to a 404?

Is there anyway I can prevent editing of topic title?

Thanks in advance.

HB · phpBB SEO Team Joined: 16 Oct 2006 Posts: 790

The topic title isn't important, the URL rewriting only looks for the ending topic number (blah-blah-blah-t1234.html). If the user changes the topic title, from the search engine's viewpoint, there's technically two URLs pointing to the same content, which is not good. The zero duplicate mod redirects changed URLs to their current URL.

chestnut · Joined: 09 Oct 2007 Posts: 3

Wow, thanks for your prompt reply. I understand SEO rewrite much better now. Very Happy

This is definitely the best support forum out here for phpbb. Most other forums are just questions and no answers. Razz

One thing about zero duplicates, I have the view=, next= type URL's already blocked in my robots.txt. And I have pagination optimized for SEO too.

Does the mod give any additional benifits? I am specially curious about how the miss-spelled-title => correct-title works since it sounds specially benificial to me.

Thanks a bunch in advance.

PS: I am still on phpBB2.

HB · phpBB SEO Team Joined: 16 Oct 2006 Posts: 790

The zero dup eliminates redundant pagination links. As the name suggests, once installed, there will be one and only one way to reference a given thread. Posts are referenced using anchors (blah-blah-blah-t1234.html#5402), so posts aren't added to the index multiple times. If a rename or old viewtopic?p= URL is followed by a search engine (or member), they are automatically redirected (HTTP 301 = moved permanently). As an added benefit, eliminating dups also saves server resources because search engines won't be asking for pages that are the same.

FWIW, I've noticed that search engines pick up redirects very fast. If you have indexed content that is later blocked by robots.txt rules, it seems to be months and months before its taken into account. A redirect is a week or two.

chestnut · Joined: 09 Oct 2007 Posts: 3

Thanks again for your prompt and detailed answer. I wasnt aware of the zero duplicate mod until now.

Will install it ASAP Very Happy

Please keep up the awesome job you are doing and the guidance you are providing. Smile