URL Rewriting in the future ?

[William Burdine]

Good follow up and I bet both MSEO and CSEO would be happier ;)

[Mat Barrie]

It makes sense to me to offer mod_rewrite as a built in option, but have IP.B test the server during install and turn it on in the software if enabled on the web server, if not give an alert and maybe its time to change servers or perhaps hosts.

Actually, there's another option if rewrite modules aren't available - it's called PATH_INFO. It allows you to use urls like www.mysite.com/index.php/forum/my_friendly_forum/19/, and index.php is actually able to use that information by pulling from the $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] variable - even on IIS (contrary to what IPB believes!)

As to why CSEO is more expensive, SEO is the new up and coming Internet business. With the Internet becoming cluttered with spam at a exponential rate, SEO helps filter out what people are really searching for.

I can't help but feel the irony of this statement - the sites most likely to use "SEO" techniques these days are infact the spam - SEO actually makes it harder for people to filter out what they're really searching for.

[Matt]

Actually, there's another option if rewrite modules aren't available - it's called PATH_INFO. It allows you to use urls like www.mysite.com/index.php/forum/my_friendly_forum/19/, and index.php is actually able to use that information by pulling from the $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] variable - even on IIS (contrary to what IPB believes!)

I've been using this for IP.Dynamic (and now Nexus) for a long time. IP.Nexus also has the option to use mod_rewrite to remove the need for "index.php".

[Matt]

Whatever we choose to do, it'll have to be post processed so that if/when you change your mind you won't lose all your internal linking in topics, etc.

[MindTooth]

I know Lighttpd has a rewrite module.

Birger :)

[William Burdine]

I LOVE it when Matt (aka Chief Software Architect) chimes in on these discussions!! Because you know when he does something is being really thought out!

Thanks Matt!

[Jυra]

From what I hear it not only takes more resources to do, but it does not help with SEO. I personally hate worded URLs. Makes urls too damn long.

I really hope IPS keeps the urls as is.

[Axel Wers]

Makes urls too damn long.

Yes it's true, especially when your topic name is really very long :D

I have question, name of this topic is URL Rewriting in the future, "SEO link" would be

http://forums.invisionpower.com/url-rewriting-in-the-future.html

?

[Lindsey_]

Yes thats how it works with CSEO. But you can change it and everything

Please IPS do not put this in 3.0

[Axel Wers]

Ok and now I have second question.

When topic named URL Rewriting in the future will be Seo link:

http://forums.invisionpower.com/url-rewriting-in-the-future.html

what will happen when moderator renames that topic? Seo link will be automatically renamed too?
If I understand correctly, indexed link in Google will be invalid when topic will be renamed. Yes? If yes I think this is not good. Topic link should be still invariable.

[stoo2000]

Only way around that I could see, is to keep a table of renamed topics and then send a 301 redirect to the new topic. Of course you still want to include the topic id in the url, otherwise you will get problems if two topics are named the same.

[Alex]

I am not 100% 'sound' on how this works, but I do believe CSEO redirects you if a topic has been renamed, or if not it redirects you to the board index

[Digi]

From what I hear it not only takes more resources to do, but it [b]does not help[/b] with SEO. I personally hate worded URLs. Makes urls too damn long.

[i]I really hope IPS keeps the urls as is.[/i]

You are right, search engines have made good strides to make dynamic (informationless) URLs cached for CONTENT, but the worded URL does indeed help quite a bit through extensions similar to meta kewords.

Yes it's true, especially when your topic name is really very long :D

For SEO reasons you should actually keep the URL length low (using the most important keywords only) and use other things to prevent conflicts (like a year/month/name structure or in our case, the topic id). So, just like meta keywords, horribly titled urls can hurt you too. ;)

[William Burdine]

WoW more SEO lack of awareness,

Renaming URL's is a good thing for the most part, it helps to validate your content. A search engine takes the URL and makes comparisons to meta tag data and key words for that page as well as content. It then evaluates all of it with several algorithms to determine if it is spam, of course age of the site, incoming urls are also used as weighted parts.

The fact that a URL is longer compared to a generated dynamic is just plain false. This depends on how it is programmed to re do the URL. Anyone ever heard of tinyurl? Kinda like that, the subject is still in the url, usually as the major keyword.

As near as I can tell, when a bot transverses your site, they read each post like an individual page by following the thread link to it, however this is fairly hard to prove as the IP.B bot recognition does not specify this nor does it tell you which user is reading which post....but that would be a nice addition to IP.B

If built correctly in and by IPS, renaming your titles (how often really does someone do that) should make no difference as the name would dynamically be changed and updated. I would think that this would actually help out CSEO and MSEO as they would not need to track these changes and could focus more on the content, keywords, etc... but then again I am not sure exactly how those products work as I have not purchased CSEO or tried MSEO at this point. It would be interesting to STOP speculating and invite them in on this discussion to clear it up.

[Digi]

Were you replying to me? I'm thinking not seeing as though I agree with you. :P

What's longer?

/269810/url-rewriting-future-1111.html

(p.s. reason I put the topic id in a folder is because, as expected from replies on most software, replies could have their own titles (check outline mode, partially implemented, in IPB for examples of this). Thus, one topic is more a folder of replies than it is one single entity. From what I understand, structuring of urls is just as important as meta tagging them. :)

[bfarber]

If built correctly in and by IPS, renaming your titles (how often really does someone do that) should make no difference as the name would dynamically be changed and updated. I would think that this would actually help out CSEO and MSEO as they would not need to track these changes and could focus more on the content, keywords, etc... but then again I am not sure exactly how those products work as I have not purchased CSEO or tried MSEO at this point. It would be interesting to STOP speculating and invite them in on this discussion to clear it up.

It's simple enough to visit the sites to see

http://icelabz.net/forum/content/Minerva-S...ixes-For-0-2-0/

I gather it's /forum/ is a real directory, content is pulled from somewhere (can't figure that one out), Minerva-SEO is the forum name, 584 is the topic id, and List-Of-Fixes-For-0-2-0 is the topic title (cleaned to be in the url).

http://communityseo.com/forums/CommunitySE...ting-t3502.html

/forums/ appears to be a real folder, "CommunitySEO-120-Beta-Testing" is the cleaned topic title, and "t3502" is probably short for topic or thread 3502.

(Interestingly in this very topic it says in their beta release they added "Ability to use "virtual folders" for forums and topics", which as I understand is the forum name as a folder in the URL).

If you try to go to

http://icelabz.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=584

you get redirected to

http://icelabz.net/forum/content/Minerva-S...ixes-For-0-2-0/

If you try to go to

http://communityseo.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=3502

you get redirected to

http://communityseo.com/forums/CommunitySE...ting-t3502.html


Based on that, I'd imagine as long as the topic id stays the same both softwares pick up what the fake url should be and sends you to it. Don't quote me on that though - there could be other factors at play that these simple tests don't reveal. ;)

[William Burdine]

Digi, yes you and I are in agreement. :D

[William Burdine]

GREAT Resource chain, Bfarber, thanks!

(customer service alive and well at IPS :thumbsup: )

[cmanns]

LightTPD supports mod_rewrite with most of the commands apache accepts with minor changes.

CSEO Does work with lighttpd but it runs like crap, ipb_seo.php is ran to rewrite each url, thus a topic with 100 links would do roughly 100 0%cpu php processes, that eats ram.

On lighttpd I do rewriting with LUA, it runs internally and works with things like Drupal, ipb should look into what Drupal does, the lua script works great with it and drupal doesnt need any modifications to work with it.