[Michael]

Do you find this as an important attribute when designing a forum, to make sure that they are being optimally indexed by Google? Or do you prefer to not mess with these server side options, or do you not believe in all this SEO hocus pocus about .html pages being spidered better by search engines then those dynamically generated such as .php ?

[Hector]

I like when forums hav that official .com thing going on. Make it's easier to find your forum and .com forums are the first to come up on the search engines.

[//Aneurysm\\]

Hell. I don't know even know how to get my site on google.....

[r3dz]

no hector, its whateber returns the most qeuries, it doesnt matter whether your .com or .org or whatever you are. but you should make you links in .php for faster linking, and less coding, also you could go to your mainpage without the .html.

[Michael]

Originally Posted By: //Aneurysm\\ Hell. I don't know even know how to get my site on google.....

http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/?hl=en&continue=/addurl
Theres a start!

Originally Posted By: r3dz no hector, its whateber returns the most qeuries, it doesnt matter whether your .com or .org or whatever you are. but you should make you links in .php for faster linking, and less coding, also you could go to your mainpage without the .html.

r3dz you realise that search engines actually prefer .html pages, they find that dynamically created pages such as those with a .php extention are much harder to crawl and optimally extract information from. Although from a webmasters point of view designing in .php is much more efficient and easier from an SEOers point of view designing inn .htlm is much more efficient and easier in getting to the top of Google :happy:

[minstrel]

That's really not correct any more - the belief is a holdover from the days when search engines had trouble with dynamic URLs. Today's spiders do just fine:

Google Facts & Fiction

Fiction: Sites are not included in Google's index if they use ASP (or some other non-html file-type.) Fact: At Google, we are able to index most types of pages and files with very few exceptions. File types we are able to index include: pdf, asp, jsp, hdml, shtml, xml, cfm, doc, xls, ppt, rtf, wks, lwp, wri.

Google and Dynamic Pages

If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few. Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page. Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index.

It's just a matter of removing session IDs for "Guests", i.e., non-logged-in visitors, which includes spiders.

Not only is the mod_rewrite function unnecessary, it has two drawbacks:

1. it may increase server load

2. it may result in a duplicate content penalty

[Amaresh]

It doesnt really make too much of a difference IMO even though its a handy feature to have.

[frankybme]

That stoped long time ago, back in the day lol. Search engines can now index all type of pages with no problems. Now if they could find a way to index grahics and flash.

[+ King Kovifor]

I don't like the .html urls on vBulletins, maybe on others but this one is like so .php that it is very interesting.