GFF Search Engine Optimization
 

GFF is now using a search engine optimization feature for the board. This means that many of the URL names now contain relevant information about post content. Previous URLs that refer to threads still work.

This feature has broken the View First Unread link at the top of every thread.

If you go onto a thread where the first unread is on a different page, it simply takes you back to the first post instead of the first unread. This is one of the most useful tools in all of vBulletin. :\

Edit: I should note that it didn't break it the same way for every thread. Post Your Desktop takes me to a post made on March 4th (the 104th out of 241st post). The G2 Werewolf thread puts me at the first post in the thread.

Nothing personal bobo, but this shit sucks. Can we change it back please? :(

I agree with Tails. It now looks like Microsoft was in charge of designing the URLs.

I agree with Capo's agreement: if I click a thread on the main page, it doesn't go to first unread post, and it's a real inconvenience. Does more harm than good.

This is also causing nearly 500 search bots to be on here right now.


Thanks to Tails for the detective work

This is not a great thing to implement; the broken "Go to first unread post" link is starting to annoy me, not to mention the fact that the URLs look... Blech.

This flat out causes serious problems with viewing certain member profiles.

For example, trying to go to the profile of ^-^ will take me to the profile of ^___^.

I like it, though I did use a similar system on my site.


Goodbye ugly urls.

Hello problems.

Yeah, problems couldn't possibly be fixed, could they?

I don't understand how http://www.gamingforce.com/forums/bo...imization.html is any less uglier than http://www.gamingforce.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2909 (it parsed my link to the other monstrosity :\ ). You can't even show the full link. That's a silly argument for the change.

Basically, from what I can tell, this plugin makes more pages get into search engines and improves keywords. The former makes it so that search engines have a link to the actual page instead of the archived page. Which is fine, but if the goal is massive amounts of users through the search engines (which I think many regulars here would be against, though I'm not really), it would be much more helpful if everything on the forum worked perfectly first. The latter doesn't even make sense here considering the utter hesitency to even put ads on the site, so I'll assume that's not it.

If this plugin is staying isn't there a way to make it so the URLs aren't so darn long? What if it was just /forums/<thread #>.html? That doesn't ruin the functionality of the plugin (spiders still see it the same way) and it gets the entire thread title out of the URL.

Edit:

Those Yahoo Spiders sure like to check out Community Commons! =o "MUST KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT MY POTENTIAL NEW FRIENDS" "Oh no a spider, get out!"

They could be fixed by letting you keep that crap on your site and having bobo set our shit straight again.

Maybe we could keep you on your site too but that's just wishful thinking.

Yeah, because Bobo couldn't possibly know about fixing stuff.

Bobo is about as good at fixing stuff as you are at not getting on peoples nerves.

Which isn't very much in case you missed it.

Ok, so maybe Bobo deserves a little more credit than that, but these links are still awful.

The links take all the myserious fun out of a clicking a link in #gfchat.
Plus their ugliness causes 1,000 pains of eye sight.

edit:
<Q-chan> And now if someone changes the topic name, a previous url won't work :(
<Q-chan> or moves it, for that matter
<Bigblah> that makes sense
<Krizzzopolis> that is ALSO TRUE!
<Bigblah> wait never mind
<Bigblah> it doesn't just make sense
<Bigblah> IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN OBVIOUS DAMMIT BOBO

In order to test whether Q's statement is true, I shall move this thread!

[17:41:53] <a_lurker> SCIENCE

AUTO-REDIRECT TEST COMPLETE

[12:41:27] <Bigblah> test this
[12:41:42] <Q-chan> IT MOVED
[12:41:44] <Q-chan> FUCK
[12:41:48] <Q-chan> NOW WHAT DO WE DO
[12:41:56] <Bigblah> now you post an apology
[12:42:01] <Bigblah> and i blame you for my misstatement
[12:42:05] <Q-chan> ;_;
[12:42:09] <Krizzzopolis> ok it auto-redirects
[12:42:12] <Q-chan> it's still ugly damnit
[12:42:15] <Q-chan> ;_____;

You can still whine that View First Unread is broken. Makes me wanna say cry.

As for viewing ^____^ and ^-^'s profiles, the links would work if they used the right "code" or whatever that represents the ^ things.

The only one I know off by heart is %20, which represents a space.

Just a question. With all these yahoo slurp spider 'users' that are looking at all the threads. Would they count towards the google ad impression?

I would hope that Google would filter for that sort of thing unless they like losing money. (It'd seem likely that they should know a good amount about how their competitors 'crawl' pages.)

Google ads are written into the page via Javascript. I'd wager whatever spidering software that Yahoo uses won't parse those scripts.

By the way, it looks like View First Unread is working again. Thanks, whomever.

It is? I've not noticed that.

In fact, for me it's gotten worse.

Not for me. Still teh borked. Fuck, sometimes it doesn't even say that posts that I KNOW are new are fucking new anymore. You know, that little yellow page thingy at the top left corner of the postbit.

Yeah, now it is broken for me again. I don't know what it was about that particular session, but it worked in every single thread I used it on. Now I'm going back in time.

Someone fix it. ;_; Vote to remove SEO.

Interesting feature, but it gives me problems. I'm accessing this from a campus connection that implements stringent filters merely based on URLs. Thus, I am unable to access any topic with titles containing "torrent" and "sex" in them. :(

I vote for this to become an optional feature - users get to decide whether they waht "thread.php?2435123" or this search-engine-optimized feature.

Psh.. I vote that this was a really dumb idea in the first place and that bobo get rid of it. It's totally not needed.

http://www.gamingforce.com/forums/sh...3055#post63055

VS

http://www.gamingforce.com/forums/bo...post63055.html

No contest. I mean come on.

I don't really care for the new urls, either.

This isn't a dictatorship anymore, bobo sold us shares (Well, not me. heh), so he has to listen to the masses now.

Did he? Produce your share certificates, plz :D

(Besides, he's only going to dispose 49%. You need a majority to force decisions through, bud :D)

The SEO is not really a feature. I didn't add them in to make the URLs cooler looking or anything. Having static URLs that represent the content greatly increases the crawlability of the site by search engines and allows our content to appear with more prominence on search engines.

I am working out all the bugs right now and I'm thinking about putting a limit on the URL length.

I like this, and, aside from the few bugs, I don't see what's everyone's big fucking problem. URLs that actually make sense are the way of the future.

I think the effect of rewriting URLs for SEO is overrated now. It made a lot of sense a few years back when Google wasn't indexing dynamic sites. Now they are, which makes this feature sort of pointless - especially if it introduces a lot of problems.

I used URL rewritings for a couple of boards myself and never witnessed a positive effect on the pagerank/search engine listings.

bobo, I'm not sure if you check Mod Hut anymore but most of us, besides Aardy, aren't very happy about this new optimization stuff. And if what Rock says is true for here as well then I think your initial goal with this thing isn't worth the effort.

Uh, it's not that big of a deal. If the bugs are worked out (as soon as possible) there's no more reason for people to complain.

Even a nerd can see that /forums/board-support/ makes infinitely more sense than forums/forumdisplay.php?f=9352367. It's not all about SEO.


By the way bobo, can you make it use relative paths instead? Some people access the boards via fire.xelium.net (for various reasons) and the URL rewriting directs them back to the gamingforce domain.

Because it broke vBulletin. I sure wouldn't care if it hadn't have broken the thing many of us use on pretty much every single thread we visit.

Ahaha, I knew if I visited board support I would find that I'm not alone.

I don't hate SEO, I just want view first unread back. I need this to live.

Yeah, well I don't think it's really that dramatic, but given that bobo probably won't ever fix the bugs I do see your point.

Ouch :(

The view last unread post function should be working fine now. Let me know if there are any other problems related to this.

Contrary to what Rock said, the site is getting indexed a lot better than before. This allows more search engine searches to eventually reach the site and give the board more exposure to people who might be interested in the community.

My question to everyone is, if it does not hurt the browsing experience at all, would it be a problem?

If it doesn't cause a problem, like the one where it was not able to see the last post, I'm fine with it. Now that's fixed I'm a happy man again.

Looks like it is working just fine, thanks!

I'm perfectly satisfied now.

yay thanks bobo ^^ I did really missed that function XD

I didn't like it because the last unread post was broken. It's working now, so I'm content.

Yeah, same here. I actually like it now that the View First Unread is fixed since links pasted in chat don't feel nearly as random (or dangerous).

I highlighted it to you in bold text. Let me do it in size 10 this time!

Make SEO compatible with the fire.xelium.net domain too

There's also the problem of most of the GFWiki links failing after the new system was put in place.

Well a good deal of those links probably don't work because of GFF crashing and losing data after all.

The previous link format is backwards compatible with the SEO. Let me know if they don't and I'll work on fixing them. :)

Some of these links should be valid, at least in the archive boards, and even changing the /forums/ for /gffarchive/ won't show the requested thread. I was wondering if it was a problem of the SEO or just invalid links.

I'll test that more extensively later.