Mod Rewrite Friendly URLs and .htaccess not working

[yo!ijob]

Hi,

I thought it was about time I changed my urls to Mod Rewrite Friendly URLs.

So I've changed the option in my admin zone and uploaded the .htaccess found in the 'do-not upload' to my site root.

Its not working. I click on a link, it shows the new url in the address bar. I've noticed that there is /forum/forums which doesn't look right.

Thanks

[Mark.B]

Uncomment this line (remove the # ) and set it to your forum directory:

# RewriteBase /forum/

[Mark.B]

Also do be aware that changing your URL structure like this will cause the loss of your existing search engine results (Google, Bing etc).

Why do you actually want to do this?

[yo!ijob]

Hi Mark, thanks for the reply. I would like to do this for better search results in Google etc. Is this not advisable?

[Mark.B]

Hi Mark, thanks for the reply. I would like to do this for better search results in Google etc. Is this not advisable?

To be honest, no.

The first thing that will happen is that all your old URLs will stop working....this means that any results already in Google will be worthless as anyone clicking them will get an invalid thread error, or similar 'soft 404'. Google will quickly pick up on this and remove them...although obviously they will also pick up the new ones gradually as well.

My own vB4 site uses the 'traditional' showthread.php?t=xxxx URLs and I wouldn't dream of changing them, for the same reasons.

You could of course write (or get someone to write) htaccess rewrite rules to write the old URLs to the new. I don't have details of how to do that though.

Search engines look at content more than anything these days...keywords in URLs are nothing like as important as they once were.

[yo!ijob]

Uncomment this line (remove the # ) and set it to your forum directory:

# RewriteBase /forum/

So what should this look like then?

[Mark.B]

In your case, assuming your domain is normally domain.com/forum:

RewriteBase /forum/

[yo!ijob]

To be honest, no.

The first thing that will happen is that all your old URLs will stop working....this means that any results already in Google will be worthless as anyone clicking them will get an invalid thread error, or similar 'soft 404'. Google will quickly pick up on this and remove them...although obviously they will also pick up the new ones gradually as well.

My own vB4 site uses the 'traditional' showthread.php?t=xxxx URLs and I wouldn't dream of changing them, for the same reasons.

You could of course write (or get someone to write) htaccess rewrite rules to write the old URLs to the new. I don't have details of how to do that though.

Search engines look at content more than anything these days...keywords in URLs are nothing like as important as they once were.

Thanks for the advice