I'm the owner of a prominent roleplaying website and forum, and I've been punching myself in the face every day because the URLs aren't very SEO friendly, and there is a ton of duplicate content. Take this, for example. This Ways To Kill A RolePlay thread is nice, but wait! If I link to any of the individual posts on the first page (or any other for that matter), like this one, it's the same exact page, with a different URL, and perhaps an anchor. That easily makes 11 different URLs (1 topic, 10 posts per page) for each thread. There's probably even MORE, as this is just the posts. I know there's a lot of discussion about how Google handles anchors, but my main concern is that my link authority, especially internally, is being destroyed by this. I'm going to call this "authority sapping a la duplication". Problem number two is that all of my URLs use simple numbers - and not the beautiful keyword-rich URLs that I'd like them to use. Using the example from above, instead of the URL being: /viewtopic.php?f=134&t=1308 Code (markup): it would be: Ways_to_Kill_a_Roleplay.html Code (markup): or something similiar. However, we have a forum that's very active, and I don't want to cause a hinderance for any of our users. We need to pick a solution and stick to it. I do have the option of using one of many phpBB SEO mods, but I, coming from a technical background, don't feel that it is necessary to edit any of my forum files. My goal is to make a solution that is 100% Apache driven. What are my options? How should I utilize .htaccess and robots.txt to my advantage? I'd like to pass the pagerank from all of my post pages to the actual main topic, so each topic, including all of the paginations (the pages for posts 1-10, 11-20, etc.), simply has one URL in Google, that's getting all the PR. How does Google handle mod_rewrite and 301s? Should I be using redirects? How should I utilize robots.txt? Can I tell Google to push PR from all the post pages to the main topic? This is a fairly advanced issue, or so I believe. Amaze me with your simple solution, please! Thanks in advance!
What are the caveats of this approach? What do I need to be concerned about? Will I always be stuck with this URL structure?