Mod_rewrite or not mod_rewrite, that's the question..

[Redleg]

I run a medium sized forum (1500 members, 30,000+ posts), and I've done a lot of SEO modifications on it..
Removed guest sessions, and a lot of other custom stuff...

Most of the topics ranks ok in google now, and google spiders and indexes new topics almost daily..

Several people have adviced me to do a mod_rewrite to get static pages, but I wondered if it's worth it or not now??

How would it affect my currect PR (or lack of) and SERPs to do a mod_rewrite??
The forum index has PR 5, and most of the topics have PR 0-2, and they doesn't seem to gain any PR even if they have several external links pointing to them..

Will the pages be spidered by other SEs (MSN, Yahoo etc..) if I do a mod_rewrite?

Never tried before, so I'm a little "scared" to do it.. :)

Any suggestions and/or experiences??

[digitalpoint]

I think the biggest thing will be removing the sessions from the URLs. While it could be argued either way, I don't personally thing rewriting the forum URLs to appear static has any real value. MSN, Yahoo and Google don't have any problems spidering this forum...

[Redleg]

The sessions are long gone, so that's no problem.

Google has spidered and indexed about 27,000+ forum pages too.
But it seems like Yahoo and MSN have indexed very few topics..
(is there an easy way to check the number of indexed pages on Yahoo/MSN by the way?)
Have Yahoo and MSN indexed the same amount of pages as google for your forum?

So it wouldn't make any real difference if I use mod_rewrite or not, since google have no problem indexing the forum? (other than an increase in topic PR??)

Thanks a lot for your time and answer. :)
Lars

[digitalpoint]

I don't know of anything in Yahoo that is similar to the inurl: function of Google, so unfortunately I don't know how to see specifically how many pages are in Yahoo. But I know it's there because I see the Yahoo Spider around a lot, and also get lots of referrers from Yahoo/MSN searches.

The mod_rewrite won't help the PR of the topics though... the problem with forums, is the discussion is dynamic, and most topics that people are actually looking at were started since the last PageRank update.

You can see from these examples that PR shows for dynamic URLs:

PR5: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/faq.php?faq=revenue_sharing (a dynamic URL linked from main page)
PR5: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=14 (a forum)
PR4: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=519 (a thread)

It's all because they have been around since the last PR update... so it really wouldn't matter if they were rewritten to look static or not. The fact that the new topics simply didn't exist during the last PR update is the real issue.

[Redleg]

I guess that I'll just skip the mod_rewrite then..

Thanks.


But how do your forums and threads get PR 4 and 5??

My forums have PR 2 (a couple have PR 3), and the indexed threads PR 0-1, even if they have been indexed and unchanged for many google updates..
The index and all of the static .php (faq.php etc..) files have PR 5.
PR 5: http://www.military-quotes.com/forum/index.php (index)
PR 2: http://www.military-quotes.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=20 (forum)
PR 1: http://www.military-quotes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3 (one of the first threads)

But the topics seems to rank pretty well in google anyway, I get houndreds to thousands visitors to forum threads from google every day.
Should I just stop worrying about the PR!?...

Thanks again.

[digitalpoint]

Well the base of the forum is PR6, so all the individual forums are PR5 or PR4 (the PR5s are because I have other links to them directly (mainly the tools/product forums have a link from the tools or product pages they support).

I wouldn't sweat PageRank, especially within a forum... it's more about ranking in the search engines, which you do regardless of PR.

[Redleg]

Thanks a lot for your time and answers, really appreciate it! :)

So I guess I'll stop worrying about the "invicible" stuff of my forum now, and start focusing a bit more on the design and layout.
New logo coming soon by the way...