I want to change the URLs of all the opening posts of topics, to the URLs of those topics.
What I want is:
BEFORE
Opening post URL: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=444568.msg3123160#msg3123160
AFTER
Opening post URL: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=444568
Or with Pretty URLs:
BEFORE
Opening post URL: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/Change-topics-opening-post-URL-to-topics-URL/msg3123160
AFTER
Opening post URL: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/Change-topics-opening-post-URL-to-topics-URL
I reckon it's a good idea for navigation and SEO. I noticed that Google will index the URL of any "posts" it finds relevant, rather than just index the "topics" URL. For now I've added lines to my robots.txt file which prevents Google from crawling any URLs with /*msg* in them. This is still a problem since Google usually "sees" the URL of opening posts, before it sees the topics URL.
Any help?
I don't think you need to worry for any thing in this regard for SEO because SMF automatically adds
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
to such pages and SMF also provides conical url.