posts url vs url standards

[HB]

Don't worry the zero dupe will take care of this kind of small problems; )

Indeed, it took months for the search engines to drop the "natural" duplicates that viewtopic?p= created (I neglected to add robots.txt entries for it, profile.php, memberlist.php, etc.). I'm happy to test the "zero dupe" corrections to the advanced rewrite mod. I've sent a PM.

[dcz]

Well, http 301 is for sure a lot faster than robots.txt, have you read this ?

[HB]

Well, http 301 is for sure a lot faster than robots.txt, have you read this ?

True, but I am asking the search engine to drop the viewtopic?p= completely to avoid a duplicate, not redirect it. The matching viewtopic?t= is already indexed. If I added a redirect for the viewtopic?p= references, I would have to distinguish between bots and real users since the viewtopic?p= references from other forums are legitimate.

[dcz]

Well, what about this : http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=4126 ?

Isn't it better for both bots and humans to only deal with a single URL standard for topic content ?

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[HB]

Sorry, I'm not making myself clear.

Prior to the robots.txt change, google indexed thousands of viewtopic?p= links, 9 out of 10 which were duplicates of the top-level viewtopic?t= link. When I finally figured out what was happening, I blocked the viewtopics?p= links in robots.txt and started using sitemaps. Within a short while all the viewtopics?t= links were recognized (thank you google), but the viewtopics?p= links remained for a long time in google's index, I assume because they're in the nearly ignored "supplemental results."

[dcz]

This I had understood, the thing is in the example I suggested, all URLs where already indexed and cached, and finally went redirected quite fast.

The same goes with post URLs and the zero dupe

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[HB]

OK, I see. You redirected:

http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=4126

To a newly minted topic URL with the post number tagged on the end:

http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/phpbb-s ... .html#4126

I assume Google is smart enough not to treat these as duplicates?

http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/phpbb-s ... 1-210.html
http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/phpbb-s ... .html#4126

Because there's no robots.txt rule to say otherwise, unlike the postnnnn or viewtopic?p= references.

[dcz]

Exactly, the html anchor is understood as it should, a place in the page.

We'd need to make sure though this would be the case the "/" suffix, but we'd really start to go off topic in this thread

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[HB]

Good point, the # isn't like those pesky ? parameters. At the risk of going further off topic, is the terminating slash really necessary? For example:

-http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/phpbb-seo-mods/mx-google-sitemaps-vt21-225.html#4140

versus:

-http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/phpbb-seo-mods/mx-google-sitemaps-vt21-225#4140

It's certainly easier from a patterns matching perspective, but other than that, I don't see any value in either .html or / terminators, SEO-wise or readability wise.

[HB]

On a related note, the notification URLs are mixed:

Code: Select all

Hello,

You are receiving this email because you are watching the topic, "[Release] mx Google Sitemaps V 1.0.1" at phpBB SEO Boards. This topic has received a reply since your last visit. You can use the following link to view the replies made, no more notifications will be sent until you visit the topic.

http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/phpbb-seo-mods/mx-google-sitemaps-vt21-210.html#4140

If you no longer wish to watch this topic you can either click the "Stop watching this topic link" found at the bottom of the topic above, or by clicking the following link:

http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=21&unwatch=topic

--
Cordialement le Staff - Thanks, The Management

I know, I know... nothing to do with SEO, and already addressed in the "no dups" mod.

[dcz]

yep I know, some thing I need to fix, will do

Then, for the slash, the SEO matter is the url need to work

For sure the shorter the better, we'll see what suffix will end up the best when we release the update


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[HB]

For sure the shorter the better, we'll see what suffix will end up the best when we release the update

I recoded sessions.php and .htaccess without the html suffix and it seems to work, except for this rewrite rule:

Code: Select all

# FORUM PROTECTION RULE
# RewriteRule ^forums/.+/([^/]+)$ forums/ [R=301,L]


What is this protecting? Incoming referrals to topics or posts that have been deleted?

I handle deleted topics / posts by redirecting to a "not found" page with pointers to the search choices. The robots.txt includes the "not found" page, so presumably the deleted URL will be removed from the search engine's cache someday. Would have been better to return a 301 to the forum's index? Not that forum topics are deleted that often...

As an aside, I noticed this board doesn't define a custom 404 page, e.g.:

http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/phpbb-f ... sions.html

Returns the standard Apache 404 page. Bleech.

Back to my testing, I also recoded viewtopic.php and viewtopic_body.tpl to follow the # convention, i.e., viewtopic?p= becomes topic-subject-vtxxx#yyy with the mini post's alt/title text = topic subject. Probably similar to what you're working on for the next version, except of course I hope your handling of pagination was cleaner. Well, I followed your lead with $seo_topic_name and declared globals $seo_topic_id and $seo_topic_start. Not pretty, but works.

[dcz]

Well the rewriterule is indeed not useful anymore with the zero dupe.

Was to prevent url like theses topic/title/folder/trick-vtxx.html

I am working on a custom error page solution, you'll see

For the rest, I suggest you just wait a bit more to directly work on the new version, will be a lot more handy to tweak as you do with 0.0.2

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