I have eblah 8.3 on my website and I have also enabled the guest reply option now the problem is that the search engine bots not only index the actual thread url but also the "Reply to thread [insert title here]" page. and the "Reply to thread [insert title here] with quote"  pages

I don't want this to happen .. anyway to stop this ?

Download P9.5, upgrade, and then enable mod_rewrite.

Check the following two threads:


http://www.eblah.com/forum/m-1126465358/

http://www.eblah.com/forum/m-1125974489/

but that will change all my fourm urls and I will lose all my Search engine traffic, it will be just like starting afresh ..?

I feared that too.  But I made my old Blah.pl just redirect (permenant redirect) to the new /forum/ directory.

I then made a sitemap generator that did a site map:

http://www.eblah.com/forum/m-1126579116/

Then I checked up on my board on Google's sitemap page:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemap

Now, over 75% (or something around there) has been crawled by Google (out of over 11,000 links in my sitemap).  Most have a low pagerank (but that's normal).

If you look at my website here: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.eblah.com/&hl=en

You'll see that I have over 43,000 pages listed on Google.

Here's my sitemap:
http://www.eblah.com/sitemap.xml.gz

It could lower your traffic at first, but in the end it'll increase your traffic.  Also, I believe you can add the ?v data to the redirect (although I do suggest NOT doing that).  You'll have to research that on your own though.

Overall, it helps increase traffic to your site.

- Justin

Also, you should be looking at MSN.

While MSN doesn't have near as many links yet (a little less than 4,000), it does have some relevant items:

http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=site%3Awww.eblah.com&FORM=QBHP

so basically what you mean is that its ok that the upgrade will change all the urls, but I can generate a sitemap for my forum with new urls using the tool you provided and that will help google to index all my new urls easily .

and with the redirect in place everyone who tries to visit something like http://www.mysite.com/cgi-bin/Blah/Blah.pl?b=abc,m=113372341  will be sent to  simple  http://www.mysite.com/forum/  

right ?

Yep.  Worked fine here, I used to use a long ugly URL myself.

Actually it's better because the new URL's use /'s instead of ,'s.  This would make Google index your pages twice, and would drive PR down (probably).

Sorry didn't get you .. you mean the new urls use slashes instead of commas ....but how can that make google to index pages twice ?

It'll still have the old pages with commas in the URL's, while also indexing the new URL's with a slash.

Quoted from admin

It'll still have the old pages with commas in the URL's, while also indexing the new URL's with a slash.

Well I may be wrong but imo that can create a duplicate content plenty for you from google. obvioulsy google does not know that you have just mod rewrited the urls ... it will think of them as two seprate pages with same content.

Duplicate content counts for less PageRank, if I'm not mistaken.

no it has nothing to do with PR, it can result  in a ban on you from google, resulting all your pages being dropped from its index  .. there isn't any hard and fast rule about it. the site can get banned or just get penalized ( huge drop in rankings)

Ah, I don't know that much about bots ... just hear about it from my server admin.  

Quoted from admin

I feared that too.  But I made my old Blah.pl just redirect (permenant redirect) to the new /forum/ directory.

I then made a sitemap generator that did a site map:

http://www.eblah.com/forum/m-1126579116/

Then I checked up on my board on Google's sitemap page:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemap

Now, over 75% (or something around there) has been crawled by Google (out of over 11,000 links in my sitemap).  Most have a low pagerank (but that's normal).

If you look at my website here: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.eblah.com/&hl=en

You'll see that I have over 43,000 pages listed on Google.

Here's my sitemap:
http://www.eblah.com/sitemap.xml.gz

It could lower your traffic at first, but in the end it'll increase your traffic.  Also, I believe you can add the ?v data to the redirect (although I do suggest NOT doing that).  You'll have to research that on your own though.

Overall, it helps increase traffic to your site.

- Justin

The sitemap being created by the generator had urls in the new format or in the old one?