Forum Moderators: rogerd
given that the big engines have no problem indexing simple dynamic urls, why should the search engine friendly archive be used?
more often than not in the SE results i find two listings for the same topic, one is the full forum and the other is the indented SE friendly archive (i.e. ranks lower than the original)
apart from annoying the user (it does me) to see double listings for the same page, i just wonder whether in the fullness of time the SEs will get wise to this and remove one listing from the index anyway.
however, it is obviously a popular option and i see it used on many big forums, just wanted to hear some other opinions.
cheers
It's a real dilemma - the archive pages are far cleaner because they lack all of the links and other gunk on the forum pages. But linkage, both internal and external, tends to be directed toward the forum pages.
Personally, I like the archive. When I look at sites that have been up for a while, the archive pages seem to do better for most searches.
how do you promote your archive? do you just have the link at the bottom of the forum pages, or do you promote it elsewhere (near top of forum home page, on other sites, etc)?
My forum software is open source and written in perl.
When I first installed the software (about 5 years ago), I hacked it about and used mod rewrite so that it would produce pages with search-engine friendly urls. I excluded robots from my cgi-bin directory so that only the static looking urls would be indexed.
This has worked well for me and I have many pages indexed. The only pages I have indexed are the topic pages and the forum pages leading to those topics. None of the useless pages (user profiles, edit forms etc) are listed due to the ban on the cgi-bin directory.
The drawback however is that this makes upgrading the software a major task. I am just about to upgrade and am wondering whether it is worth the effort these days to create search engine friendly urls.
if you do upgade the forums and do not use mod_rewrite, will you lose all the search engine listings which you have now?
i suppose it depends on the upgrade cycle and how often you have to do it, but if it is only a few hours work, then i would continue with the mod_rewrite.
i think i shall definitely use the archive function - although i am currently investigating a mod_rewrite plugin for vb which even puts the topic titles in the url - seems to be the best of both worlds, but like you i am worried about upgrading and potential problems ;)
As far as promoting the archive, I mainly use the standard footer link. I also link to the archive page from the forum page (in addition to the built-in link going from the archive to the forum page). I'm not convinced this is a perfect solution, I just haven't found a more effective one yet.
I was certainly torn between going with the vanilla software with its dynamic URLs and my modified version with the clean URLs.
I had planned to 301 redirect the clean URLs back to the dirty ones so I don't think I would have lost the listings.
However I have checked out the code for the new version and it is now a lot easier to make the required amendments than before, so I have decided to stick with the existing structure.
