Cherokee + MyBB

[User 2877]

Found where that image is from.

It's from some official SEO Guide of Google. Never seen it before so thanks for sharing.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin...swer=35291

And the PDF points to this: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin...swer=76329

Seems that they are now offering a more neutral stance on keyword URLs than before. And I'll concede they may even lean toward keywords a bit.

Grrr...eating my words now.

[Euan T]

That's the whole problem with SEO. Google constantly change the rules and the way their algorithms work. You have to be pretty active to keep up to date in order to not get penalised.

Anyway, let's take this back on topic or I'll have to split the posts to a new thread

[Firestryke31]

My argument for using word-based URL rewrites isn't for SEO or crap like that, but simply which is easier to remember: this-is-my-thread.html or thread.php?tid=167153518

Granted I've never set them up before so I don't get to claim they're actually better via any stats or anything, but from a "I'm trying to tell my friend about this particular thread while away from the computer" stance I'd prefer the word-based one.

[CAwesome]

As for such rewrites being pointless, look around you... apart from a few technologically stoneaged forums, all modern webapps (Wikipedia, WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, GitHub...) use rewrites. They all use words. None of them use numbers. There is no facebook/twitter/... .com/member.php?uid=9382464 and neither should there be.

Facebook uses profile.php?id=xxx unless you go out of your way to choose a username. The rest of those sites, they don't use rewrites, they use a modern routing engine to begin with. Rewriting the hell out of MyBB's 20 million gateway files isn't acceptable in modern programming.

With all that said, if you're just running a tiny forum on a shared host, it probably doesn't matter.

[frostschutz]

This user has been denied support.

The rest of those sites, they don't use rewrites, they use a modern routing engine to begin with.

Different name for the same thing. It doesn't matter who makes the decisions (the webserver according to rewrite rules, or the webapp according to routing rules), you're still mapping some arbitrary URL that does not physically exist to some functionality in your webapp. You just implemented it differently, by moving Apaches RewriteRules to your webapp's RoutingRules. The advantage is that once set up you don't have to modify your webserver configuration or .htaccess anymore which is a good thing, but it doesn't necessarily make a difference to the URLs themselves.

Rewriting the hell out of MyBB's 20 million gateway files isn't acceptable in modern programming.

MyBB has a hundred entry points (index.php portal.php forumdisplay.php showthread.php ...), that can't be helped. That's what webapps look like when they don't use rewrites.

A modern webapp has one entry point and everything is rewritten to it, so all URLs are rewrites (or whatever you want to call it). Static files may still be served directly simply because it's usually more performant to have the webserver handle them directly rather than going through the webapp. But even those are sometimes rewrites (physically put in a static/ folder which is not reflected by the URL).

"they don't use rewrites" is eyewash. All of them do. One way or another.

If you don't use rewrites, you end up with MyBB and 20 million gateway files. Without rewrites (or equivalents), there is no other way to do it.