How to optimize your forums to get more pages indexed with search engines.

PART I

[PART I] [PART II]

If you run a large internet forum, one that has hundreds of people online at the same time, you know you've got to find some commercial values in it.  Unfortunately, a lot of search engines dislike dynamic URLs and lots of forums (i.e. vbulletin, phpbb, iron board)  use sessions IDs for the forum page URLs, and this transforms these URLs into dynamic ones.   If you've paid attention, you will notice that only a few pages of your forums are indexed, this means, Google and other search engines have actually crawled your page but they indexed the static URLs.  

What's the difference between a static URL and a dynamic URL?

A static URL does not change over time, it stays the same for ALL the visitors. 

An example of a static URL:  http://www.yahoo.com

An example of a dynamic URL:

http://www.yourforum.com/view.php?sid=211224546512321212

A dynamic URL are unique to each visitors and they CHANGE over time. This means, if you visit tomorrow, the URL will not be the same as what you're looking at now.

For most forums, they assign a "Session ID" to each visitor.  If you want to optimize your forums to work well with search engines, there are two methods available:

• Method 1 : Manually remove session IDs from the page template URLs.
• Method 2: Install a forum hack mod for a forum archive.