I think this URL format issue is more general than, and mostly
orthogonal to, the question of whether each BBoard forum should be a
separate package instance or not.
Maybe that change alone would get our BBoard threads indexed
by Google. But maybe not. And even if it does, there is no guarantee
that Google - or any other search engine - will continue to handle
URLs the same way they do right now.
Ideally, anything that we want to look like static content to a search
engine should be presented with a static-looking URL. E.g., no
? or & in the URL, query variables are
instead embedded implicitly between / symbols.
Now, if you have that new "static content" URL scheme working for,
say, BBoard, it makes sense to use only the new "static
content" URLs for BBoard. There's no good reason to have the human
users see one sort of URL and search engine robots see another,
because if they do, then when a person manually links to something
from their homepage, they'll be using the URL format that the search
engine doesn't like - not good.
Whatever this tool to eliminate query variables from the URL is,
should it not be powerfull enough to use for the entire
toolkit if we so desire, even if we choose to use it only in certain
specific targetted applications? Has this been discussed/designed before?
