Finally Mod-Rewrite My Forum

Well, I finally got around too it. I decided against the other hacks we had mentioned before and just went straight to mod_rewrite instead. Turned off the archive and just let one lot of pages exist for all. Much easier this way IMO.

I havent found it necessary to do the mod rewrite to get pages indexed, but it'll be interesting to see how it works for you. Please keep us updated.

Can do. I don't think it will do as well as the archive hack, but it will make it easy now for all those engines that don't parse dynamic URL's well, into the forum. Lets face it, even though Minstrel disagree's, the archive hack does exactly what I have said before, it takes forum content and produces it to the search engines, so it looks nothing like a forum, instead like normal pages. That is exactly what the hack does, just ask the creators. Give them pages that don't contain all the useless rubbish that a forum strives upon, and the page itself will do better than the forum equivalent, static URL's or not.

Exactly. Forums rely on alot of extra HTML to function and provide the appearance. This is why I dont like most skins because they add even more HTML.

The archive hack does one other thing - it adds pages. I also think Noppid and I might have found a way to avoid the dup content concern with the archive by adding an RSS news feed to the archive. Take a look: vBulletin Webmaster Archive (http://www.vbwebmaster.com/forums/vbulletinforumhistory/)

Yer, that could just do it. Obviously you would have to test it all to be sure, but it should work ok. One thing though is that too many syndications are throwing your page context out, as if you sift through some of the archive with your RSS feeds, you just have to look at the Google ads to see how they are interpreting that page. A lot of pages come up with the correct ads, a lot come up with the wrong ads. This could be mainly because the syndication is throwing out the main focus of the page?

the rss feeds were customized on a forum by forum basis but are general in nature. Just did it last week so its still early, but I think it might just work. :)