Update to Google Friendly Voting URL

[morrigan]

The voting URLs need an update to be better google friendly, primarily to make sure that spiders/bots are deterable from voting for members. I think that the link itself should be something like:
https://TOPSITEURL.com/vote/username

This would allow topsite owners to use their robots.txt to block spiders/bots from crawling those links.

You can sort of do this right now with using index.php?a=in&u=* however it would be better SEO to block bots from the gateway page altogether.

 

[cajkan]

You can do that with htaccess BUT then you will have problems with google, duplicate title/description etc...

I think is best to keep vote page not indexed by google

 

[morrigan]

I think you misunderstand what I'm looking for. I'm looking for google friendly links that you can choose not to index them through robots.txt by default. Currently you have no control over whether google can get to that page or not... or any spider/bot for that matter when you have "google friendly vote links" enabled. The only way to control whether bots access vote links or if they see that page is to turn off google friendly vote links and use the robots.txt to block the query string. Which is fine in theory but overall I think it's just better form to allow for vote links to have "pretty" urls.

 

[Basti]

When google friendly link is disabled ( you have index.php?a=in&u=*, note that that actually hurts your seo, as you have less "same backlinks" ), a php header is in place not to index these gateway pages, so you not need to worry about gateway indexing

Now for prettier Non friendly links, you can rewrite them using ur htaccess file

RewriteRule ^vote/(.*)/ index.php?a=in&u=$1 [L]

Your members need to update their code tho and you need to update ur link code html files to reflect this change