Unusual Request

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TRPN
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Unusual Request

Post by TRPN »

First of all I would like to thank you all for creating such a awesome board. I plan to use this board on quite a few of the domains. I have requested below features before also at other board, I am not sure about the outcome.

For about 3 and half years I have been involved in the field web marketing and specifically search engine positioning. After all these years of experience, along with many other things there is one thing that I have learned and is very clear - "When it comes to search engines, it is best to use plane .html/.htm page without any "?", "," or any special character within the URL of the web site.

I have noticed that most of the forums when browsed have at least a "?" within the url. I was wondering if it would be possible to create / update / modify PHPBB2 in any that the url will be without any special character. I have also noticed one site that has such a board - you can see it at www. webmasterworld.com/active.cgi.


Why a BB with .html/.htm and short url and no special character is recommended
  • Search Engines prefers plane vanilla .html/.htm pages compared to any other type of pages.
  • It is easy for search engines index all the pages and hence each and every page stands a chance of getting ranked during search query.
  • Check out http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=n ... d%2Ecom%2F to see how many pages are linking back Search Engine World. Also, it is to be noted that most of the links are coming from www. webmasterworld. com that is actually a discussion board.
  • Reason for short url (not too deep): the deeper the site/pages the less importance is given by search engines for ranking pages. [Example url of the post in forum: http://www.forumdomain.com/forum1/13242.html]
  • One the biggest reason why this feature should be implemented is that, major search engines (Google, AltaVista, fast/all the web, ....etc) uses link popularity as a big factor for ranking a web sites. So every businesses wants a good link popularity. So it would be easy for a business/web site to get a good link popularity if they have a link coming from the header/footer of a bulletin board.
  • As more and more businesses are getting aware of the potentials of search engine positioning, it would be highly recommended for PHPBB2 to easily get on big corporate web site. As even it might seem a very small issue, but there are companies who do consider such smaller but highly important issues, that will effect their long term presence on the net.
I hope this feature will be added in PHPBB2.

Thanks you for your support.

Vishal Thakkar
Search Engine Positioning @ TopRankPosition.com
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Pat McRotch
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Post by Pat McRotch »

Ultimate Bulletin Board uses html pages, but that's because it uses files on the webserver, not a SQL database, to store all the posts etc...
If you want to make a *.html/*.htm page show the forums either:
a) configure the webserver to excecute *.html pages as php scripts and rename the first page to index.html not index.php (you'd have to change the url's around the place on the board though.
b) make the webserver treat *.html/*.htm pages like *.shtml and put just

Code: Select all

<!--#include virtual="path to index.php" -->
in the page.

That's the only way I know of doing it, there's probably a really simple answer but I don't know it :?
TRPN
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Post by TRPN »

Pat McRotch wrote: [url=http://www.infopop.com]Ultimate Bulletin Board[/utl] uses html pages, but that's because it uses files on the webserver, not a SQL database, to store all the posts etc...
If you want to make a *.html/*.htm page show the forums either:
a) configure the webserver to excecute *.html pages as php scripts and rename the first page to index.html not index.php (you'd have to change the url's around the place on the board though.
b) make the webserver treat *.html/*.htm pages like *.shtml and put just

Code: Select all

<!--#include virtual="path to index.php" -->
in the page.

That's the only way I know of doing it, there's probably a really simple answer but I don't know it :?



I have noticed that Infopop does that and that is one of the reason that why people are paying good money for that.

To be honest, for a person like me who don't know much about managing server, it is not going to be easy to try above steps [but I promise I will surely try].

I was wondering if PHPBB2 team can look at this and if possible implement it [more like optional feature from admin side, as many might not like this feature as I believe it might eat of some server space].

Thank you and looking forward for a favorable response.

Vishal Thakkar
Search Engine Positioning @ TopRankPosition.com
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Ewald
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Post by Ewald »

to learn more about search engine friendly php pages read this:

http://www.zend.com/zend/spotlight/searchengine.php

and this:

http://www.webmasterbase.com/article/485

the best two articles you can find on this subject
you have to know some php though...

regards,
Ewald ;)
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Dzien Dobry
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Post by Dzien Dobry »

This sounds like one of the most important feature requests that I’ve ever encountered.
Pit
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Post by Pit »

This sounds like one of the latest and least implentable feature requests I have encountered. ;)

/me waits and hopes no major arguments flare up, although they usually do
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hsim
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Post by hsim »

I think it's not that bad idea but anyway it is too late.
But maybe this could simply be achieved by hacking one of the always-included files to explode $PATH_INFO and store the values in $HTTP_GET_VARS and by hacking the append_sid thingy to do & and ? to / wrapping.
email me: hsim at gmx.li
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Dzien Dobry
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Post by Dzien Dobry »

If this feature isn’t implementible on the software side, what is the best and easiest method to get around the obstacle?
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Post by Pit »

In my opinion, something like that should be a hack if it is anything at all. The devs are already working flat out to make this board, and in my opinion they probably don't have the time to make a different version for the, in my opinion ,minority of people who not only have root access to their server, but also feel they "need" their forums to have this feature. In my opinion.

Heh, kanuck, consider that catchphrase officially nicked. ;) Well, in my opinion it is nicked. :P
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Tau
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Post by Tau »

Hm.. well, you could do something like...

http://localhost/phpBB.php/Post/18476.html

How would one implement this? well, if there's a file called phpBB.php in the WWW root, it will be executed with "Post/18476.html" in the PATH_INFO environment variable (try this with a <? phpinfo() ?> file). In theory this could eliminate the hook (?) from the URL, and it probably isnt too hard to implement (then again I havent really taken much of a look at the guts of phpBB2...)

Dunno. May want to use that as a starting point ;)
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Ewald
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Post by Ewald »

The Black Pit wrote: In my opinion, something like that should be a hack if it is anything at all. The devs are already working flat out to make this board, and in my opinion they probably don't have the time to make a different version for the, in my opinion ,minority of people who not only have root access to their server, but also feel they "need" their forums to have this feature. In my opinion.


1.) you don't need root access for this...
2.) yes, this should not be in phpbb2 because we all want it to be out soon :!:
3.) this is something that should have been considered when phpbb2 was designed (no offence here ;) )
4.) imo this really makes a difference for search engine placement

regards,
Ewald ;)
Pit
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Post by Pit »

Well, root access or no, what you do need is either 1)a host that has or is willing to modify the server config file or 2) access to your own server config files. Otherwise the php will not be processed, IIRC. 8)
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Ewald
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Post by Ewald »

Black Pit follow the link:

http://www.webmasterbase.com/article.php?pid=47&aid=485

and if this does not work either because your ISP doesn't have apache :shock: or your server is Windows based :shock: :shock: :shock: or you can't or don't want to use a .htaccess file :x you still can use it in the form:

http://www.domain.com/article.php/999/12/

because afaik google and other search engines can deal with this nowadays ;)

regards,
Ewald ;)
TRPN
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Post by TRPN »

So does this mean that PHPBB2 Dev team will grant me my Christmas wish?


:p Vishal Thakkar :p
Search Engine Positioning @ TopRankPosition.com
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Post by gameofhit »

TRPN wrote: So does this mean that PHPBB2 Dev team will grant me my Christmas wish?


Well, I can't speak for them, but I would guess no... At least not your christmas list. The feature list for 2.0 is locked (and has been for some time) I bet they would consider it for 2.2 though... or at least listen ;)

I know that google can find urls with the query string at the end, although I think some of the other engines, like AV, have trouble with this.

Check out google's mad skeelz:
http://www.google.com/search?q=view+topic
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