SEF/SEO URLs

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phpDummie
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by phpDummie »

sleevedbiker wrote: If you use adsense and/or google analytics you will see it all.
And if you don't?
How would Google know about returning visitors?
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by sleevedbiker »

phpDummie wrote:
sleevedbiker wrote: If you use adsense and/or google analytics you will see it all.
And if you don't?
How would Google know about returning visitors?
ill tell you there are things that help boost your ranking that you would never guess do to.
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by Pony99CA »

sleevedbiker wrote:
Pony99CA wrote:
sleevedbiker wrote:it really does nothing with search engines. Search engines like google go based on how long the URL has been up based on years and the quality of the content such as your returning visitors[...]
What does "returning visitors" mean? Google has no way of knowing how many returning visitors you have. (They can track how many people click your link in the Google results, of course, but I don't recall ever hearing that they use that in their results display.)

One of the biggest things that they do use (which you omitted) is backlinks -- how many other sites link back to you (weighted by those sites' PageRank, I believe). That's why blog/forum spammers exist -- not to get people to click on their spam links, but to get more backlinks that increase their sites' placement in the results pages.

The URL may be given some weight (for example, if the words in the URL are found on the page, that could give you a small bump), but I haven't seen anybody claim that's a huge influence.

Steve
oooo yes they do. they track all IPs that come on to google. If you use adsense and/or google analytics you will see it all.
Well, yes, if you're using a Google service on your site they can. But, for precision, I'll amend my statement to say "Google has no way of knowing how many returning visitors you have if you or the site you're visiting aren't using a Google service".
sleevedbiker wrote:Also, you are correct that backlinks play a part in the algorithm, but backlinks can also hurt your site at the same time. you need to make sure they are the highest quality backlinks. So the people that use bots to do this can actually hurt their site by doing it.
Yes, Google is penalizing link farms. (I hope that my personal link pages, sites that I've actually visited and liked, aren't penalizing the sties that I link to....)
sleevedbiker wrote:As for the URL the only thing that should be relevant to the site is obviously the main url _____.whatever)although .coms rank higher. Anything other than that wont doesnt do anything. and neither do all these stupid keyword boxs i see everywhere. those are the joke of the internet.
I don't know. Consider a site about dogs (say dogs.com for simplicity). Say that somebody wants to search for dachshunds and Google has indexed dogs.com/dachshunds.html. The domain part of the URL is very generic, but the path and page name will likely be more specific and contain keywords on that page. That could conceivably give that page a (small) boost in the results.
sleevedbiker wrote:[...] But, with that in mind my conclusion to the BIGGEST part of being ranked as high as possible has to do with how many years the URL/site has been around. And theres nothing you can pay for to beat that. Other than buying a URL thats been around for a long time.
I don't know about that, either. Maybe your site ranked so highly because it got a lot of content in all of those years and a lot of backlinks.

I registered gooddogsitting.com in April 2008, not that long ago. It's a small site for a local dog sitting business. Searching for "good dog sitting" brings up my site #9 in Google (it was #3, I think, a few months ago), #6 in Yahoo (it wasn't even on the first page back then) and #1 in Bing (it was previously #2). I haven't done any SEO for those terms (although I did register with two pet sitting listing sites), so I presume the excellent ranks are based partly on the domain name itself.

I did add some keywords about our location to try to do a little SEO for other terms, but those rankings aren't quite as good. For example, for "Hollister dog stting" -- I'm on page 6 in Google, #10 in Yahoo (instead of #6), #9 in Bing (instead of #1). (Although I think that those are better than they were the last time I checked with the possible exception of Google's results.) Still, I'm on the first page in two major search engines with no money spent for SEO. (For "Hollister dog sitter" the resuls are worse -- page 5 in Google, page 3 in Yahoo, page 3 in Bing.)
sleevedbiker wrote:Everything else just bumps you up on the list some[....]
I think that's the point. In a competitive space, every little bit can help, so the thought is that human friendly URLs might help a bit by getting you listed a little earlier in search results. (Whether they actually do or not is the big question.)

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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by sleevedbiker »

google changed their algorythm again on july 17th and it seems that its mainly based on backlinks now. That seems to be the main % of the algorythm since July 17th... in a percentage basis I would say its about 80% of the algorythm. The way i tested this was with numerous websites that had no related content in the url extension that would show pages before the sites that did, took the closest url in that search that had related info in the url and checked its backlinks as well... one of the tests showed that it had only 4 backlinks and no related content in the url, while the other had related content in the URL and 0 backlinks. The one with 0 backlinks was 2 pages behind the site that had the 4 backlinks.

This is for google though....

Alexa still uses the domains age as a big factor in their algorythm.

But of course most search engines now use google as their reference for results.

As for buying the backlinks, you just have to make sure they are high quality. if they are high quality and done right then google wont know the difference.
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by phpDummie »

sleevedbiker wrote:
phpDummie wrote: And if you don't?
How would Google know about returning visitors?
ill tell you there are things that help boost your ranking that you would never guess do to.
It doesn't answer my question.
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by /a3 »

phpDummie wrote:And if you don't?
How would Google know about returning visitors?
Google ads, Google+ buttons, Google Analytics, Doubleclick, anything else linking to Google that gives away referrer headers. That's primarily the reason why I don't use Google ads and other Google services linking from my site.

When you click links on Google they use JavaScript to locate your browser to a Google page, IIRC. That way they can see what pages on Google you visit.
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by Mehtuus »

One possible reason to institute "simple URL's" is for program compatibility when including home page links within Firefox Addons that you maintain.

For example, this address will cause Firefox v17 to deem the addon incompatible:

Code: Select all

http://forum.website.net/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=53
On the other hand, this address works fine:

Code: Select all

http://forum.website.net/viewtopic.php?f=36
The problem, it seems, is the ampersand (&) symbol. Within an addon that I maintain, I had to use a bit.ly short url address in order for the addon to become "compatible" while still pointing to the proper web address.

Is this a shortcoming of phpBB for not being able to render simple url's without symbols, or with Firefox for deeming addons incompatible because the internal website link includes an "&" symbol? I am convinced that the answer will depend on the user's perspective.

I think that phpBB should have the "simple URL" feature available for those that wish to use it. Also, Firefox should be able to properly understand home page links that include the "&" symbol.
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by callumacrae »

Mehtuus wrote:One possible reason to institute "simple URL's" is for program compatibility when including home page links within Firefox Addons that you maintain.

For example, this address will cause Firefox v17 to deem the addon incompatible:

Code: Select all

http://forum.website.net/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=53
On the other hand, this address works fine:

Code: Select all

http://forum.website.net/viewtopic.php?f=36
The problem, it seems, is the ampersand (&) symbol. Within an addon that I maintain, I had to use a bit.ly short url address in order for the addon to become "compatible" while still pointing to the proper web address.

Is this a shortcoming of phpBB for not being able to render simple url's without symbols, or with Firefox for deeming addons incompatible because the internal website link includes an "&" symbol? I am convinced that the answer will depend on the user's perspective.

I think that phpBB should have the "simple URL" feature available for those that wish to use it. Also, Firefox should be able to properly understand home page links that include the "&" symbol.
That's Firefox being stupid, probably. Ampersands in URLs are as normal as question marks or forward slashes. Search google and look at the URL there, for example.
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bigpapa78
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by bigpapa78 »

Is there an easily to install SEO URL mod that works with phpbb3 version 3.0.11? Thanks
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by Lumpy Burgertushie »

bigpapa78 wrote:Is there an easily to install SEO URL mod that works with phpbb3 version 3.0.11? Thanks
you don't need one.
phpbb has very good SEO out of the box.

the only thing you really need to do is get good content about whatever your subject matter is and a lot of it.

You can make sure your category/forum/topic titles are keyword rich but other than that you don't need to worry about anything but finding good content.


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mrsklb
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by mrsklb »

After reading all the pros & cons, I have to agree, I'm not sure SEP/SEF URLs are going to do much for my site, and that's ok, but I do like them as Vanity URLs.

I see the issue, 10 customers all write "Help", so the Vanity URL gets help-10 as the name, so, in that respect it's a little dodgy. However, as Vanity URLs forum/sub-forums that are static it's brilliant.

I answer a lot of helpdesk queries day in, day out and I refer back to the forum a huge amount of the time, sometimes my customers need a little handholding so I direct them back to our direct sub-forum for their product, rather than just the general board. Having a vanity URL for this would be much easier than remembering: viewforum.php?f=23&sid=1b64da5f5d2a93d8292686ea3693c976 /productserieshere would be much easier.

Yes, I do have shortcuts, yes I do have bitly links, yes I do have a notepad that I copy & paste from, however it's important to me that I have something inbuilt.

We also sell through a distribution outlet, I would like to list my product with them with a product sub-forum, with vanity URL, I think it looks cleaner and it keeps the brand awareness in place.

Looks like we're going with the SEO mod that noone seems to like, but given the choice between the 2 above, in position, I'm being lazy, but vain.

Thanks for everyones feedback.
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by Pony99CA »

mrsklb wrote:I answer a lot of helpdesk queries day in, day out and I refer back to the forum a huge amount of the time, sometimes my customers need a little handholding so I direct them back to our direct sub-forum for their product, rather than just the general board. Having a vanity URL for this would be much easier than remembering: viewforum.php?f=23&sid=1b64da5f5d2a93d8292686ea3693c976 /productserieshere would be much easier.
You should never include the Session ID (sid=) parameter in a link, so the link is really viewforum.php?f=23.

While that's not nearly as bad, human-readable URLs are nicer, if not strictly necessary.

Steve

P.S. Anybody using bit.ly or any other URL shortening system outside of a constrained medium like texting and Twitter should be banned from the Internet. :D I never click those links because you don't know what could be lurking there. (And, yes, I know about Long URL, but why should I have to use that?) If you use URL shortening in a forum like this, I presume that you're trying to pull something over on us. :roll:
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lakuda
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by lakuda »

I see many of the top forums in the world have no sort of fancy SEO URL's, they just have the standard ugly URL's and many of them rank well in search engines such as Google.

Lately, because of more and more people trying to game the search engines, Google has become increasingly aware of this and has reacted accordingly by putting less emphasis on URL's (if any emphasis at all).
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mrsklb
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by mrsklb »

Pony99CA wrote:
mrsklb wrote:I answer a lot of helpdesk queries day in, day out and I refer back to the forum a huge amount of the time, sometimes my customers need a little handholding so I direct them back to our direct sub-forum for their product, rather than just the general board. Having a vanity URL for this would be much easier than remembering: viewforum.php?f=23&sid=1b64da5f5d2a93d8292686ea3693c976 /productserieshere would be much easier.
You should never include the Session ID (sid=) parameter in a link, so the link is really viewforum.php?f=23.

While that's not nearly as bad, human-readable URLs are nicer, if not strictly necessary.

Steve

P.S. Anybody using bit.ly or any other URL shortening system outside of a constrained medium like texting and Twitter should be banned from the Internet. :D I never click those links because you don't know what could be lurking there. (And, yes, I know about Long URL, but why should I have to use that?) If you use URL shortening in a forum like this, I presume that you're trying to pull something over on us. :roll:
Good tip :) I can shorten many of the topics this way, will save a lot of hassle. :)
I normally don't follow bitly links unless I know where they came from. We have a vanity short URL that we run through Bitly, however I have low expectations of its use. :)

I'll still keep an eye out on a good plugin, but for now your work around will do fine! :D
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by arifur »

These days you really do not need SEF url. Search engines are more than capable recognizing the content of your site without SEF url. Yes it does help the users (humans) if you have SEF url but thats about it. Wel phpbb 3.1 is out and it does support extensions so we will not require to use any hack or mod. Some one will create a SEF extension.
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