Feedback wanted on URL rewriting thing (Page 4 of 5)

As has already been discussed earlier in these forums, "search engine friendly URLs" are mostly an anachronistic misnomer. While Google previously did not index sites that passed more than one parameter in the URI, they changed that behavior a long time ago. If you want proof, do a Google search for the following keywords. You'll find that -- lo and behold -- this very forum topic is right at the top (even with it's "non-friendly" URL):

feedback wanted URL rewriting

Semantic URI structures are superior not because of search engine relevance, but for reasons having to due with URI permanence and aesthetic readability.

I'm thinking that reason could be that phpBB uses those horrible session variables in its URL's unlike PunBB..

This didn't work at my server, where MultiViews is turned on. /post/1/ is being redirected to /post.php/1/ then, and gives an error. It was solved by putting

Options -MultiViews

in .htaccess.

There are so many articles covering the fact that Cool URIs don't change, canonical URIs are more search-engine friendly, they are more user friendly and even more cachable (most web caches ignores resources with query parameters) that I won't repeat them here.

I love that PunBB is implementing more "static" URIs in 1.3, but for future versions, it should include a "slug" field in the database for all GET-able resources (forums, posts, etc) so that they can be requested with this slug instead of the ID. You'd need a separate field in the database for it, plus a sanitizing function that washes away all icky characters so the final slug is URI-friendly and readable. Such a function can be found in this WordPress plugin.

Please consider this! It would bring the already great forum to new hights compared to other (rubbish) forum software!

No it's not; and no it won't compared to others syntax of URI.

That may be one factor, I've also gone from /item/123 to /home/whats-up-dude type of urls.

But I truly believe it's the title of your story that really sets it apart more than the url.

Using keywords in url is the best way to make rewritting.
Removing .html is a good idea too...

according to a document published by google (don't remember where it is though), keyword ranking is based on a few factors.  one is the length of time your domain is registered for.  sites like mine that renew domain names yearly do no rank as high as a server who's domain is registered for the next 10 years.  another thing is that static content ranks higher than dynamic content... static content being described as a static file.  I'm guessing that a .html file will be considered a "file" and /asdf/asdf will be considered a directory, the .html will gain a higher ranking than the directory.

I use web ceo, and google analytics to monitor my site, and the progression from dynamic, to /asdf/asfd, to 123/title.html has happened very slowly, but the move between /asdf/asdf and /title.html has had an exponential increase in search engine hits, and it happened sort of all of the sudden (and my site doesnt get new content very often)...  when I moved from dynamic content to /asdf/asdf I also started using google sitemaps.  I used that for a number of months, but when I migrated to the html file model, the number of hits for the things (given certain keywords) on my site increased by orders of magnitude.

We have this already in subversion. It still needs a bit of polish, but it's there.

can we change the extension to something other than .html/.htm? i know it's not a high priority for most but it's nice to have that capability.

I think it includes the id either way, and that's the only part used to find the right topic.

Is it still not working there? I was under the impression that this changeset dealt with the issue