I'm using the mod rewrite option in the admin panel to have search engine friendly URLs.
My site is at www.learners.me.uk
At first it seemed all good and appeared that it worked well. I thought search engines would have no trouble spidering the site.
I have changed over to SMF after running PHPBB for a couple of years and getting fed up with all of the SPAM members I was getting.
Anyway, with PHPBB (modded with able2know search engine hack) Google was spidering my site evry day and all of my topics were being indexed.
Since moving over to SMF Google has completely turned its nose up at spidering the site. None of my SMF topics have been indexed at all, just my home page.
I couldnt understand why this was so I used a few tools to find out, and it seems that the search engine friendly URL's in SMF do not work at all.
take a look at my site and mouse over the links. You will see that they are short search engine friendly URL's.
BUT....
Put my URL www.learners.me.uk into the spider simulator at http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php and It sows you what the search engines see when the visit the site.
Search engines see URL's that look like this... http://www.learners.me.uk/index.php?PHPSESSID=9148f66e4f268c99ad27931f747a8503&board=227.0
And that is definately NOT search engine friendly. Google, Yahoo, MSN etc will not often touch a URL that contains a session ID. This is because every time it visits, each URL will be assigned a different session ID and if the search engines were to index them they would end up with several copies of each page in their serps.
Put simply, usless there is a way of stopping these session ID's for non members, SMF is not very search engine friendly at all and a Google sitemap would be the only way to get the site indexed properly. That in itself is not practicle because any sitemap tools would have the same problem as the google spider an not be able to properly spider the site. You would have to manually create a google sitemap.
do the freindly url's work in the new version ? can I see an example of what this should be ?
thank you
???
anyone ???
As far as I understand, session ID's won't display for search engine spiders as of 1.1 RC2. However, you'll need to turn off session.use_trans_sid in PHP - otherwise, SMF won't be able to get rid of the session ID's.
At least on my 1.1 RC2 forum, session ID's are not displayed for spiders.
After a single click which Google and MSNM etc will do the session id will dissapear :)