david63 wrote: ↑Sat Apr 10, 2021 8:35 pm
The problem with trying to do something like that is that it is pretty much irreversible and you could end up not being able to access your board.
Personally I cannot see what difference it will make to anything - Google does not seem to have a problem with indexing phpBB sites.
The only thing the f parameter is used for on topic links I'm aware of is the "Users browsing this forum" list. Removing it wouldn't have any effect other than rendering "Users browsing this forum" useless, I believe it would also affect the "forum location" listing for the who is online list.
The fact that Google can index both
is the problem whether it's related to indexing or ads. If you look in the head tags for a topic there is canonical url set which tells the SE what the base url is that contains no f parameter.
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=12345">
Typical usage is the main published links on site match the canonical url , links on that page may have links with other parameters for sorting etc. When a bot follows one of those links from the page or somewhere else the page with the extra parameters should have canonical URL of base page if it's basically same content, e.g. sorting. You are telling the bot don't index this as it's duplicate content. phpBB's usage is a bit backwards because the canonical URL's used in the head tags are published no where on the site. Minimally the impact is a SE may be utilizing both their resources and server resources downloading the duplicate URL's when the bot could spend that time indexing new content or reindexing old content.
As a side note there in one benefit to this parameter as far as bots go. You can use it as wildcard in robots.txt to prevent a bot from trying to download topics they do not have permission too.
stevemaury wrote: ↑Sat Apr 10, 2021 8:37 pm
You would be spending a lot of time for zero benefit.
As far as Adsense goes although a small one this can be an issue, as halil16 noted they may not display ad when the URL changes. You would need to wait for the Adsense bot to reindex it only for it to find it's a duplicate of the canonical URL. It's another source of duplicate content. If you remove the f parameter from the published links that are going to get indexed first it never changes when topic is moved etc.
“Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I have found several thousand things that won’t work.”
Attributed - Thomas Edison