MyBB Community Forums

I have chosen mybb because it seems to me it shall work just fine with search engines. In the process of thinking about fine-tuning it, I have found out the format of links in rss feed, and index (last post table) is as follows:

showthread.php?tid=1&action=newpost

whereas I would rather see it being simply:
showthread.php?tid=1

My main argument is not to confuse search engines with what might seem like duplicate content to them. Plus having two different links to same content means a partially lost link power, from SEO point of view.

Has someone already attempted to solve this issue, or is some hack available for that? Of course something that doesn't have to be modified with each new mybb version would be best.

I'm thinking of either a] having an option to turn off the newpost action parameter b] having nofollow link parameter for all those links.

Another, more radical thought, is to completely ban search engines from indexing the regular forum, via robots.txt, and only allow them to index the archive.

How are your thoughts and experiences on doing this on your forums?

The action=newpost refers to when you want to start viewing the thread from the point where you didn't read it yet. (So you start reading where people posted new posts.)

Thanks Peter, I understand the functionality. I think I will inspect the templates and try to make those links nofollow, so that they don't get spidered.