[geeklog-devtalk] topic.php and url conformity

[Richard S. Westmoreland]

In case you haven't seen my posts in the Cool Hacks forum about using static urls for the geeklog topics...

I made a copy of index.php and borrowed code from various files, and created a topic.php.  If you look at my site you'll observe that when clicking on a topic link, instead of getting /index.php?topic=anti-spam, you'll get /topic.php/anti-spam.  Not only does this optimize my search engine results for that keyword, but I think it organizes the sections a little better as it now is treated like a directory.  With additional tweaks I'm also using the section name as my title tag.  I've updated all the code to generate the proper links to use it.

If Geeklog uses this as a permanent change, it can be useful for other things.  Not only do you get consistency using static links, but you can (and I'm going to) strip out the unused code in index.php that was used to read the topic variable and parse the stories based on that.  This should reduce the file size and speed up rendering the front page.  Also as an additional benefit, I'm going to customize the topic.php to use different layout templates so my sections appear different than the front page.

As a side note, I wanted to point out that even with static links turned on, a lot of the geeklog code is still writing dynamic links in various places.  This is causing duplicate pages for googlebot to crawl, and you end up with inconsistent index results, a dilluted page rank, and sometimes a penalty (which is happening to me).  I have cleaned up these links but there is now an additional problem.  Since Google already indexed them, it will continue to recrawl them - and even with static links turned on the dynamic links work as is.  What I propose is that (when static links are enabled) Geeklog will determine what the referral link is, and if it's dynamic, use a 302 Permanent Redirect to the static version page.  This will tell Google to update it's index with the static page.

Apologies for reposting what I already posted in the forums but I figure this mailing list is better suited for my "ideas" and I can communicate directly to the developers.  I'll post to the list this type of stuff from now on.

Thanks,
Richard S. Westmoreland
http://www.antisource.com
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