SEF/SEO URLs

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Pony99CA
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by Pony99CA »

Maël Soucaze wrote: And with all due respect, I don't understand why it's more appropriate to a blog than a board, both have content and that content should be readily understood without clicking on the URL to read it. ;)
If people take the few extra seconds to use the long form of the URL tag, that's moot. HTML doesn't have a "short form" Anchor tag (where something like <a href="http://forum.svpocketpc.com" /> would display as http://forum.svpocketpc.com).

Is it really that much harder to use

Code: Select all

[url=http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2100309]SEF/SEO URLs[/url]
than

Code: Select all

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2100309
NOTE: This only addresses your point, not the whole "typing URLs" issue.

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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by callumacrae »

Pony99CA wrote:
Maël Soucaze wrote: And with all due respect, I don't understand why it's more appropriate to a blog than a board, both have content and that content should be readily understood without clicking on the URL to read it. ;)
If people take the few extra seconds to use the long form of the URL tag, that's moot. HTML doesn't have a "short form" Anchor tag (where something like <a href="http://forum.svpocketpc.com" /> would display as http://forum.svpocketpc.com).

Is it really that much harder to use

Code: Select all

[url=http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2100309]SEF/SEO URLs[/url]
than

Code: Select all

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2100309
NOTE: This only addresses your point, not the whole "typing URLs" issue.

Steve
You've missed the point entirely :P
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by Pony99CA »

Callum95 wrote: You've missed the point entirely :P
I don't think that I have, but thanks for that well-reasoned comment. :roll:

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Dog Cow
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by Dog Cow »

Remember when people used to type HTML code into .html files?

What did you call these files? Well, you'd have an about page, so that is about.html. Then maybe you would have a news page, maybe call it news.html. Or you could have a page that's a book review, so call it book_review.html

In all of these, the name of the file (which appears as part of the URL) describes what sort of content you'll get.

Should we have just named them 0.html, 1.html, and 2.html?

I think that this logic follows too when the content is dynamically generated from a database.
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by dpaanlka »

You can use Apache mod_rewrite to get something a little prettier, like http://www.mydomain.com/topic/60382 or heck even just http://www.mydomain.com/60382 if you really want to go minimalist. You could setup a system like this:

mydomain.com/topic/60382 for topics
mydomain.com/user/13983 for user profiles
mydomain.com/forum/13 for forums

Or... minimalist version...

mydomain.com/60382 for topics
mydomain.com/u/13983 for user profiles
mydomain.com/f/13 for forums

Then you don't even have to bother with applying a MOD to phpBB itself.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mo ... write.html

I think the explosion of URL shorteners like bit.ly proves that having the article's name as the URL isn't what people are concerned with.

You can even setup your own URL shortener using this script:

http://yourls.org/
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by Pony99CA »

dpaanlka wrote:You can use Apache mod_rewrite to get something a little prettier, like http://www.mydomain.com/topic/60382 or heck even just http://www.mydomain.com/60382 if you really want to go minimalist. You could setup a system like this:

mydomain.com/topic/60382 for topics
mydomain.com/user/13983 for user profiles
mydomain.com/forum/13 for forums

Or... minimalist version...

mydomain.com/60382 for topics
mydomain.com/u/13983 for user profiles
mydomain.com/f/13 for forums
You left out posts. :D

Also, the documentation talks about reading from an external database, so you could presumably also pull the topic title/user name/forum name/post title, too, and add a cleaned version of that to the URL.
dpaanlka wrote:I think the explosion of URL shorteners like bit.ly proves that having the article's name as the URL isn't what people are concerned with.
Those may be fine for Twitter/texting, but if people use them in a full text forum like this, I think they're hiding something.

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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by phpDummie »

Pony99CA wrote:
Maël Soucaze wrote: Is it really that much harder to use

Code: Select all

[url=http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2100309]SEF/SEO URLs[/url]
than

Code: Select all

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2100309
NOTE: This only addresses your point, not the whole "typing URLs" issue.
Actually, yes, not much harder but harder.
You'd not believe how many users inexperienced with BBcode get it wrong.
Most often it's just

Code: Select all

[url]http://google.com[/url]
Or they forget the equal sign, or they misplace the equal sign.
Or they do this number

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[url]http://www.phpbb.com/theme/images/logo_phpbb.png[/url]
and say "picture not showing"

In all, plenty of room for error.
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Lumpy Burgertushie
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by Lumpy Burgertushie »

while true, that has nothing to do with using "pretty urls". people will make those mistakes no matter what.


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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by Pony99CA »

phpDummie wrote:
Pony99CA wrote:Is it really that much harder to use

Code: Select all

[url=http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2100309]SEF/SEO URLs[/url]
than

Code: Select all

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2100309
NOTE: This only addresses your point, not the whole "typing URLs" issue.
Actually, yes, not much harder but harder.
You'd not believe how many users inexperienced with BBcode get it wrong.
Kind of like how you butchered the QUOTE tags, making my post look like Mael said it (which I have fixed here)? :o

It's really not that much harder (as you admitted). Just click the URL button for a link and paste the URL between the tags. Getting a descriptive link (phpBB Official Site) is just slightly harder.

If people would preview their posts and check their links, they'd solve most of those problems. I do that with every post that I write.

Steve

P.S. What's wrong with that first Google link? It worked fine after I removed the CODE tags.
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by phpDummie »

Pony99CA wrote: Kind of like how you butchered the QUOTE tags, making my post look like Mael said it (which I have fixed here)? :o
Exactly!
Pony99CA wrote: P.S. What's wrong with that first Google link? It worked fine after I removed the CODE tags.
URLs are not rendered inside code tags, nothing is. It's always plain text, no smilies, no formatting.
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by /a3 »

phpDummie wrote:URLs are not rendered inside code tags, nothing is. It's always plain text, no smilies, no formatting.
That’s the whole point of code tags, isn’t it? :?
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by Pony99CA »

/a3 wrote:
phpDummie wrote:URLs are not rendered inside code tags, nothing is. It's always plain text, no smilies, no formatting.
That’s the whole point of code tags, isn’t it? :?
Yeah, I thought that he used the CODE tags so that the URL tags would display as an example of bad usage. Maybe he meant:

Code: Select all

[code][url]http://google.com[/url]
[/code]
But why would anybody use that for a link?

NOTE: I'm suprised that rendered properly. I thought the first /CODE tag would have terminated the first CODE tag and I'd have a /CODE tag left outside.

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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by sleevedbiker »

forumpojken wrote:Im trying phbb3 now for a forum Im gonna run.

And Im very surprised to see that it doesnt have SEF URLs as standard? I can only get this with some external weird hacks?

Imo SEF urls should be included as standard, and turned ON by default.. Why isnt it? I cant see any downside with having real readable urls

ie.

http://www.mysite.com/forum/why_does_my ... te_me.html

instead of

http://www.mysite.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2

Is it harder to code to get readable urls?

I cant understand why anyone would wanna have it like this? Please enlighten me!

Do I have to pay for Vbulletin to get a proffesional looking forum?

Excuse me for any misspellings.. english isnt my native language.
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, and based on a couple other things, but nothing to do with your url. Thers a lot of things people claim are SEO and in honesty they have nothing to do with the algorithm. Its actually amazing on how many SEO sites honestly think this matters.
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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by Pony99CA »

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.

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Re: SEF/SEO URLs

Post by sleevedbiker »

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. Adsense works by tracking and scanning your cookies and cache. Whenever someone visits a site that uses either adsense or google analytics all the users info is relayed back to google. You wont recall them saying anything because they wont tell anyone how their algorithm works. The only way to find out is to test different strategies and find out. They also change their algorithm once a year or so. But then you have other top search engines as well such as Alexa who does it a completly different way, the trick is to work on one search engine at a time with trial and error. I am not going to give away all the stuff that i found that works but ill tell you some that should be obvious to anyone whos been writing code on the www for over 10 years. such as submitting sitemaps, robot.txt, etc. but the top 4 search engines all look for different things.

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.

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 used SEO urls on another one of my sites for trial and error purposes for 8 months and their was absolutly no difference with them, which removes SEO URLS out of the equation.

The majority of these "SEO BLOG" sites are one giant scam mixed with a drop of truth. I had a website from 1993 that i sold about 5 years afo thats ranked higher than anything and has absolutly 0 of this SEO crap and it was ranked this high because of how long its been around. The person who purchased it put it in some online website museum page which has a collection of a lot of sites from the early 90s that were kept the same as they were when first created. And of course dropped down the list now due to moving it into his website collection/museum. 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.

Everything else just bumps you up on the list some, but wont ever compete with how many years the site has been around.but the best thing to do is to make as many pages as possible, the larger the site the more it goes up as well... again nothing you can pay for or download short of paying some one to work on your site along with you or having a forum with a lot of active members or a social network with a lot of members as well.
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