I installed the Topic Maker mod. I added a semi - hidden link to the index of html pages that this mod makes for each of your topics. I thought I understood that now when someone searched with a search engine they would find the content they were looking for but the link would be to the .htm page. Once at the .htm page they would be redirected to my actual forum page. Right?
I just did a test search on Google for "Spinbusters" and "ghosts" because I knew these words could be found in one of my topics. The search results came back with the link directly to the topic i.e. www.spinbusters.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=55 This works great but why / how? Should it not be a link to something like 55.htm?
Are the spiders able to crawl our forum topics without this mod?
google can index asp pages. Alot of spiders do not index .asp pages because they could get stuck on a site for years with endless loops etc.
Thanks Brad for replying. Basically, the mod helped with misc. other spiders but was not needed for Google. So I now have several bases covered as far as getting my forum content "out there". Thanks again for the info. After reading the docs with the topic maker mod, I was under the impression that all crawlers needed the html to index the content.