Cherokee + MyBB

[soulcyon]

I noticed the other threads regarding Cherokee are years old, so I'm making a new thread to contain my solution.

I'm currently using the Google SEO plugin, which asks to add a certain .htaccess to my server. However, Cherokee does not handle htaccess files, so here is the proper way to handle the rewrites from htaccess inside of Cherokee.



Just take note that all regular expressions start with a "/". Without this initial slash, none of the expressions seemed to match in the webserver. Here is the default htaccess rewrites:

[Alex Smith]

Nice but might I recommend a copy and paste option for people.

[User 2877]

Have you considered the obvious? Don't use Google SEO. Despite it's name it's not required to run in order to obtain good rankings.

[CAwesome]

Have you considered the obvious? Don't use Google SEO. Despite it's name it's not required to run in order to obtain good rankings.

The owner of Digital Point has said the same thing. Don't waste your server resources on pointless rewrites.

[soulcyon]

Nice but might I recommend a copy and paste option for people.

I don't think thats possible in Cherokee. It's a stupidly simple UI, which is a breeze to use and maintain. But it's not geared toward IT professionals, or at least what I believe is "advanced usage". This is also probably why Cherokee didn't fly high as a web server.

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Have you considered the obvious? Don't use Google SEO. Despite it's name it's not required to run in order to obtain good rankings.

The owner of Digital Point has said the same thing. Don't waste your server resources on pointless rewrites.

I agree, but I really hate seeing ".php" at the end of a URL. Just seems to primitive and disgusting, I even recoded the PHP a little bit, so that I don't even have ".html" anymore. I didnt even think about the SEO usage when I did the rewrites, haha.

[CAwesome]

I used to use Cherokee but the admin interface got really annoying so I switched to nginx.

[s3_gunzel]

f-f[id].htm and f-t[id].htm FTW

[frostschutz]

This user has been denied support.

Don't use Google SEO.

In your own forums (MyBB Central) you have a sitemap, meta description, canonicals, all of which are features also provided by Google SEO. You're also using rewrites (MyBB's). So I'd say you're doing a fair bit of SEO on your end all by yourself.

Please don't confuse me with one of those SEO nuts. I don't promise nor even mention any rankings, nor do I claim anywhere that you NEED this plugin. You don't need anyone's plugins, not mine, not labrocca's, ...

It's named Google SEO because it's based on Google's own recommendations for SEO (such as Google's SEO starter guide). Which consists more of what should be considered common sense than secret tips to get to first rank. That's all there is to it.

I'm not doing it so much for ranking but just because I happen to like Thread-Cherokee-MyBB much better than thread-133728.html.

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.

f-f[id].htm and f-t[id].htm FTW

If you want those, you can do it with a simple code change to MyBB.

I really hate seeing ".php" at the end of a URL. Just seems to primitive and disgusting,

Pick something you like - the choices are all yours.

[User 2877]

Please don't confuse me with one of those SEO nuts.

Never even mentioned you personally in my remarks. I just think people misunderstand your product or what it does for them.

As for MyBBCentral.com SEO urls. I more or less wanted to try the default feature of MyBB when I upgraded into the 1.6 branch. To be honest I wish I didn't.

I'm not doing it so much for ranking but just because I happen to like Thread-Cherokee-MyBB much better than thread-133728.html.

Exactly and I don't think that's clear enough to most people. Google themselves do not recommend SEF URLs.

It's named Google SEO because it's based on Google's own recommendations for SEO

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.c...-urls.html

Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That's our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems

And...

If you have a dynamic URL which is in the standard format like foo?key1=value&key2=value2 we recommend that you leave the url unchanged, and Google will determine which parameters can be removed; or you could remove uncessary parameters for your users.

So when you say you're offering recommendations of Google SEO I hope you realize that you're not. What you're offering is the populist misbelief that SEO URLs offers offer better ranking.

I know your plugin is excellent at what it does and I think it covers lots of problems for SEO noobs but make no mistake that your plugin is less than neccessary for SEO ranking and it's missing a fair amount of stuff like the addition of nofollow tags and the removal of some redundant links on pages.

They all use words. None of them use numbers. There is no facebook/twitter/... .com/member.php?uid=9382464 and neither should there be.

That's more of a cosmetic choice and until Google themselves say otherwise I don't want SEO URLs nor will I recommend them. Someone has to offer some balance in the equation.

[frostschutz]

This user has been denied support.

Google themselves do not recommend SEF URLs.

Yes, they do.

   

That's from Google's search engine optimization starter guide.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.c...-urls.html

Apart from the post being old, that's about broken rewrites, pulling random numbers into the static URL, thereby producing an infinite number of static URLs. People using this blog post as argument against rewrites in general have not understood it.

Also:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin...swer=76329

A site's URL structure should be as simple as possible. Consider organizing your content so that URLs are constructed logically and in a manner that is most intelligible to humans (when possible, readable words rather than long ID numbers). For example, if you're searching for information about aviation, a URL like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation will help you decide whether to click that link. A URL like http://www.example.com/index.php?id_sezi...f849f730f1, is much less appealing to users.

And that's exactly what Google SEO URL attempts to do within MyBB. URLs with readable words rather than long ID numbers.

it's missing a fair amount of stuff like the addition of nofollow tags and the removal of some redundant links on pages.

It does nofollow for links posted recently, giving moderators time to moderate spam. See also the starter guide on nofollow. As for redundant links, I can't think of many relevant ones... if it can be done by editing templates, it doesn't belong in this plugin. Pages that are never interesting for a search engine (such as newreply.php) are blocked by robots.txt anyway. You'd have to point out something more specific.