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  1. phpBB
  2. PHPBB-9158

viewforum/viewtopic pages unnecessarily duplicated with start=0

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      If you go for example here:

      http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewforum.php?f=47

      you will notice that "General" heading is hyperlinked to

      http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewforum.php?f=47&start=0

      Similar behavior exists in viewtopic, heading of the topic gets start=0 added to its url.

      "start=0" is unnecessary and results in two pages being indexed by search engines for every actual forum or topic on a forum.

      I found out about this through google webmaster tools. In html suggestions I was told that I have pages with duplicate titles. Sure enough, since the pages are identical their titles are as well.

      Attached patch checks whether $start is equal to zero, and if so, does not append start=$start to viewforum/viewtopic urls.

      Technically several other pages have this behavior too, e.g. viewonline and mcp. But since they are unlikely to be usefully indexed I did not bother changing them. On my site I have robots.txt prohibiting viewonline and mcp access, among other things.

            ToonArmy Chris Smith
            Oleg Oleg [X] (Inactive)
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