Search engine friendly URLs....

[Matthew]

How do you make search engine friendly URLs when you have a PHP site?

I got it working with mod rewrite but it only showed the file itself when its ment to be opened within index.php

Anyone know how to do it?

[Zachery]

vB3's url's are fairly friendly by default

[Matthew]

Its not for vB, they are already in search engines.

Its for my main site. www.mattsbabes.co.uk

[Zachery]

Your URL's look friendly to me for the most part. as long as theirs no session i dont think Google or anything really has a large problem

[Matthew]

They don't get indexed though. When I had a HTML site some pages were ranked quite highly.

But ever since I've had my PHP site (since early nov 03) none have been indexed.

[iDavid]

Your URLs don't look bad, but you can also use mod_rewrite (on Apache), if available, for even better URLs.

Try inserting this into .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
  RewriteRule ^/index.php?page=(.*) ^/pages/$1

I'm a little rusty on mod_rewrite, but to the best of my recollection that should make all requests for /pages/x serve /index.php?page=x. You might need an Apache reboot for this to take effect.

[CeleronXT]

Your URLs don't look bad, but you can also use mod_rewrite (on Apache), if available, for even better URLs.

Try inserting this into .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
   RewriteRule ^/index.php?page=(.*) ^/pages/$1

I'm a little rusty on mod_rewrite, but to the best of my recollection that should make all requests for /pages/x serve /index.php?page=x. You might need an Apache reboot for this to take effect.

Anyone else know if that's the proper .htaccess to use? Doesn't seem to be working for me.

[ceska]

Just purchased VB

We had an Invision Board and it was recently upgraded to the newest version 1.3. I understand the converter is in the members area? I haven't looked yet but so far just saw mentions of a 1.2 converter. I hope so.

So now we want to use VB... and are just diving in.
I've noticed on many VB boards that the session IDs show in the link.
I need the code so that the links are Google friendly. Our forum site has high rankings for popular terms, in Google. I would hate to completely loose them by switching to the great VB.

[leitel]

I agree with the need. I have a site that currently rates number one on Google. The site is www.noblood.org. This is using vB. Type in bloodless for example and notice that it finds NoBlood.org with the vB in the title. BUT......... when it comes to stats, i would like to see more meaningful page hits. I only see http://noblood.org/forum/showthread.php?t=739 for example. NOT the subject of the thread which in this case is: VA bloodless program? For THAT reason, I too am interested in a mod rewrite. Next chance I get, that will be a priority.

[Arjan321]

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteRule ^t/([0-9]*)[/]?$ 	/forum/index.php?topic=$1

An example how mod_rewrite works.. First the "friendly" url, starting with a "^" and closed with a "$", and second the original URL..

The [/]? is to make sure URLs with a trailing slash are also converted