Is it correct that the next and previous link in viewtopic.php is not search engine optimized? (see upper right corner)

If I look to this board then I think it is... Thats not good, those links are used a lot by search engines. If you exclude viewtopic.php in robots.txt crawling goes much slower.

Dave wrote:Is it correct that the next and previous link in viewtopic.php is not search engine optimized? (see upper right corner)

Yes, even though this board is still using phpBB2, our phpBB3 mod will not rewrite them.
The reason behind it it that these links are duplicates of the next and previous URL.
So it's really not a good idea to have them spidered by bots.
We could imagine to link them directly to the actual next and previous url, but doing this would require 2 (at least one) extra SQL on viewtopic.php as well as some more code.
So all together, and since these are not even displayed on prosilver, it's better to leave them as they are, because this way we can disallow them by robots.txt.

And NO, disallowing viewtopic.php in robots.txt won't slow indexing, it's the opposite actually, unless you did not read the install file fully and implemented it while your forum already was indexed with the natural urls.

++

What I meant with my comment about viewtopic.php and robots.txt was that in this situation the links are not being followed. I have a very busy forum and crawlers are leaving the board much faster now. In fact Google never leaves normally, now it does. Google indexes normally so fast that new topics are being found in Google within hours. Now it suddenly takes days.

I know its better to block viewtopic.php in robots.txt because of duplicate page indexing.. And I want to do that, but I want to have those previous and next urls still working.

Now that I know that you guys don't support this, I will build my own sql for it. Sorry I'm really stubborn.

And yes I use subsilver2, subsilver2 for life

dcz wrote:unless you did not read the install file fully and implemented it while your forum already was indexed with the natural urls.

This is a very important matter :

install wrote:IMPORTANT :
If your forum previously was indexed with the natural urls (viewtopic.php etc...), then you must make sure
that the robots.txt advised for our mod rewrite is not installed, if so delete it from the server.
This because we want to redirect old urls before we disallow them, it's crucial!
In such case, a month or two after you activated the zero duplicate, you can safely implement the robots.txt.

So if you are in that case, delete your robots.txt and implement / activate the zero duplicate mod with post redirection set to at least "guests" ASAP.

OK thanks guys.. 301 like crazy now (tested it with sniffer)

also the next/previous links are now 301 but I still don't understand why there is no default rewrite for that... OK it costs 2 light SQL instructions ..

Also Google still likes to crawl postxx.html, strange because of;
Disallow: /phpBB/post*

In my robots.txt

Did you know of Google's &as_qdr=d feature? To see the last indexed pages of 24h/week/month or year?

Pretty handy. Hopefully Google is coming back to full power now because it really is almost dead .. In fact it is only indexing postxx url's now (Yes I removed viewtopic.php from robots.txt)

Our forum and Google

dcz wrote:This is a very important matter :

install wrote:IMPORTANT :
If your forum previously was indexed with the natural urls (viewtopic.php etc...), then you must make sure
that the robots.txt advised for our mod rewrite is not installed, if so delete it from the server.
This because we want to redirect old urls before we disallow them, it's crucial!
In such case, a month or two after you activated the zero duplicate, you can safely implement the robots.txt.

Drop your robots.txt, at least the lines mentioning the forum

As you can see if you follow the post url in google index, it is properly redirected, so you don't really want to disallow anything before the redirecting will have been taken into account by bots, eg wait at least two month for the robots.txt.