David on 8/4/2007 at 14:32
Without the thread or forums titles there is pretty much zero benefit in this.
TheOutrider on 8/4/2007 at 15:35
I think what Vigil's trying to say is that just using the thread/post ID should ideally work as well, for shorter direct links to posts and/or threads. Of course there's little point in having just that, but it would definitely be a nice extra :D
David on 8/4/2007 at 15:41
Indeed, however there's also a Duplicate Content penalty with search engines to take into account.
Nameless Voice on 8/4/2007 at 16:01
Like I said before, you'd have to maintain backwards compatibility with the old links, as there are thousands of links to TTLG threads all over the place, and changing the URL format would break them all otherwise.
David on 8/4/2007 at 16:07
Of course we would.
This is nothing more than URL rewriting. When you click on a link the request is translated from /threads/12345/what-ever/1/ to showthread.php?t=12345&page=1
Obviously we weren't going to move to a directory-based flat file format.
Vigil on 8/4/2007 at 18:24
Ye-es, but your argument about the duplicate-content penalty applies equally to the old showthread.php?t=12345&page=1 format.
But since the links which the forum itself produces would use the full syntax anyway, the abbreviated syntax would only be used as a convenience for people typing out the URLs by hand (the fringe-case that MM suggested). Which isn't common enough to incur any kind of duplicate-content penalty.
Plus I'm pretty sure Google is smart enough not to apply such a penalty to pages within the same domain, given the commonness nowadays of being able to reach the same content from multiple URLs.
David on 8/4/2007 at 18:37
The current showthread.php method is not penalised as much with duplicate content because it is essentially one page with various arguments, which is one reason why dynamic pages are not indexed as well as flat file pages. The rewrite method makes it appear as though everything is running flat file. This is the problem with duplicate content.
Don't ask me to explain the whims of Google, I have no idea why.
I certainly don't want to make TTLG less visible in search engines that it currently is.
Mortal Monkey on 8/4/2007 at 18:47
Can't you just robots.txt the duplicates? Or doesn't that work with forum crawlers?
Ziemanskye on 8/4/2007 at 19:20
I realise this may be a bit of a dumb question since I can only barely follow what you're on about, but wouldn't it be better for searching to include some reference to the sections in the link?
]www.ttlg.com/forums/bioshock/is-bioshock-too-weird/126469/385649212
]www.ttlg.com/forums/thief-editing-guild/how-many-custom-stims-do-you-need/1587570/15659956
kinds of thing - thread number at second to end (or on the end), and post number right on the end, and preferably both being optional.
Telliamed on 8/4/2007 at 23:16
I expect keywords in URLs to be as effective as meta-tag keywords. Just another way for spambots to abuse the search engines and eventually ignored by the spiders to compensate.
I don't know how effective directory-like navigation is. It looks nicer at least. And I think I read somewhere that Google will ignore certain types of query strings.
Completely unrelated, but how about supporting (
http://www.opensearch.org/) opensearch. That's pretty nifty.
