IPB forum and archive pages

[Asia_Expat]

When viewing the list of topics in each for page, the URL looks like this...
www.exampleforum.com/forum/index.php?showforum=4&prune_day=100&sort_by=Z-A&sort_key=last_post&topicfilter=all&st=90

This is very difficult to get read by search engines and so old threads effectively become orphaned. In order to assist with crawling, I plan to remove most of the variables and list links to those archive pages by shortening the URL's to...
www.exampleforum.com/forum/index.php?showforum=4&st=90

Can anyone see any problem with this?

[caveman]

What you want to be sure of is simply that you don't have two DIFFERENT URI's pointing to the same page. That could create dup content issues if the bots manage to read both URI's.

[Asia_Expat]

Actually, I decided to leave the URI as it is. I found a few of them indexed in Google and so I can only assume the multiple strings aren't a problem... however, I can't find a single one of these unmodified URI's in Yahoo. Any idea what the limits are for different engines?

[edited by: Asia_Expat at 3:31 am (utc) on Mar. 27, 2007]

[caveman]

Incorrect assumption, I'm afraid. If you can find both indexed, all that means is that they're seeing and counting both.

The question is how they react to that. A few here and there on a site are no big deal. The more dup's there are inside of a site, and the less 'juice' the site has, the greater the risk.

[Asia_Expat]

Sorry, you misunderstood me (I wasn't clear enough)...
I haven't created any modified URI's without the variables. I have left the URI's as they are with all the variables in place (& this & that & the other). There is no dupe content. My concern is search engines having difficulty parsing through all those ampersands and indexing the content on that URI... i.e. can they do it?

[edited by: Asia_Expat at 5:35 am (utc) on Mar. 27, 2007]

[caveman]

Ah, I see. Well, they used to say that they couldn't do it very well, or in some cases, wouldn't do it even if they could, since those very long strings were often indicative of kinds of URI's they did not want to index anyway. But several years ago I started noticing G was indexing very, very long URI's including but not limited to affiliate strings, dynamic pages from SEO-unfriendly CMS systems, and even at times session URI's which they really don't want to index.

What I think I see now is that URI's that are very long seem to have a greater association with the Supplemental Index than shorter, better formed URI's. Not sure how much of this is chicken or egg, but generally speaking, having shorter, kw oriented URI's seems to increase the chance of a page ranking well, and I do not believe that the reasons are entirely confined to kw's in URI.

[Asia_Expat]

I see. I noticed this also with Google but Yahoo isn't indexing them at all in my case and I really wonder if I should just remove the strings, as indicated in my first post, because in the modified example, the resulting page is identical. TBH, I really don't know what those strings do anyway.