[ABD] URL Rewriting (SEO URLs)

BryanFR · Post by **BryanFR** » Tue Mar 24, 2015 6:03 am

It would be possible to have the possibility of custom links of the kind, remove
A) /the-name-forum-f[id].html vs /the-name-forum-f[id]/

and

B) /the-name-forum-f[id]/the-name-topic-t[id].html vs /the-name-topic-t[id].html

Thank you !
BryanFR

stratege1401 · Post by **stratege1401** » Thu Mar 26, 2015 12:37 am

umarizal wrote:This project here, is not more advanced?

I think it would be interesting focus on a single project instead of creating several.

This project is pretty dead. On their forum, the last active message is 4 month old. I post one ont march 20th, ans still not even an ack of it ...

... and on their github, no move for over 4 month too ....

Lumpy Burgertushie · Post by **Lumpy Burgertushie** » Thu Mar 26, 2015 1:57 am

man of these type of URL rewrite type MODs/extensions wind up being abandoned or removed because people discover that they really dont make very much difference for SEO or for the user experience after all.

robert

ONEMDX · Post by **ONEMDX** » Tue Apr 28, 2015 6:51 am

so these kind of mods/extensions are useless ?

umarizal · Post by **umarizal** » Tue Apr 28, 2015 11:34 am

Lumpy Burgertushie wrote:man of these type of URL rewrite type MODs/extensions wind up being abandoned or removed because people discover that they really dont make very much difference for SEO or for the user experience after all.

robert

This is very strange because all SEO sites we consulted on the internet always say that dynamic urls such as phpBB, are not the best.

All SEO sites I've seen, they always say that friendly urls would be those without variables &,? or = for example and among others and containing the keywords of the content in the urls is the best.

Lumpy Burgertushie · Post by **Lumpy Burgertushie** » Tue Apr 28, 2015 4:24 pm

if that is what you are seeing then those SEO sites are telling you false information or outdated information.

google etc. have no problem with variables in the url. it used to be a problem several years ago but google is always changing and getting better and since all of the php based dynamic sites use them , it had to figure out a way for it to not make a difference.

as for the "user friendlyness" of them, most users do not even know or care what a link says any more, they just click it. and/or the only thing they see is the link text and click on that.
now, link/anchor text is a good thing for SEO but that is not the same thing as "friendly" urls.

changing the way that phpbb and other scripts of its kind are created often causes all sorts of problems.
for phpbb, it often means that every update you will have to redo those changes. it can also interfere with other modifications you may wish to make later etc.

doesn't mean it can't be done and I am not saying that there would be absolutely no benefit in SEO , just that the very small possilbe benefit of them is not worth the possible problems from doin it.

your time and effort would be much better spent working on the content of your board and maybe some changes that would actually help with SEO like page titles, h1 text, forum titles, topic titles, etc.

good luck,
robert

**My CDB Contributions** · Post by **HiFiKabin** » Tue Apr 28, 2015 4:31 pm

Lumpy Burgertushie wrote:<snip>
doesn't mean it can't be done and I am not saying that there would be absolutely no benefit in SEO , just that the very small possible benefit of them is not worth the possible problems from doing it.</snip>

Somewhat off topic, but I guess its the same as following Googles recommendation and have a 'secure site' which is worth less than 1% of ranking points. Yes, it may/will make a difference, but is it worth it?

Taka51 · Post by **Taka51** » Wed Apr 29, 2015 11:38 am

hello
Your extension has errors, I just saw on my way on the demo link

[phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file [ROOT]/ext/tas2580/seourls/event/listener.php on line 451: Undefined index: topic_posts_approved
[phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file [ROOT]/ext/tas2580/seourls/event/listener.php on line 341: Undefined index: forum_name
[phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file [ROOT]/ext/tas2580/seourls/event/listener.php on line 451: Undefined index: topic_posts_approved
[phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file [ROOT]/ext/tas2580/seourls/event/listener.php on line 341: Undefined index: forum_name
[phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file [ROOT]/ext/tas2580/seourls/event/listener.php on line 451: Undefined index: topic_posts_approved
[phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file [ROOT]/ext/tas2580/seourls/event/listener.php on line 341: Undefined index: forum_name
[phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file [ROOT]/ext/tas2580/seourls/event/listener.php on line 451: Undefined index: topic_posts_approved
[phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file [ROOT]/ext/tas2580/seourls/event/listener.php on line 341: Undefined index: forum_name
[phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file [ROOT]/ext/tas2580/seourls/event/listener.php on line 451: Undefined index: topic_posts_approved
[phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file [ROOT]/ext/tas2580/seourls/event/listener.php on line 341: Undefined index: forum_name
[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 5133: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3843)
[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 5133: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3843)
[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 5133: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3843)

For now on phpbbseo is flat calm with this extension, make more seven months no update on this one, a little disappointed, I would love her to be officially available

I finally know for now I'm quite hesitant to install it on my field that is in line despite preference to the url re writing for a good SEO

cordially

umarizal · Post by **umarizal** » Fri May 01, 2015 3:45 pm

Thank you very much, my friend Robert (Lumpy Burgertushie) for your explanation.

caunhocquay · Post by **caunhocquay** » Tue May 05, 2015 2:03 pm

Could you please support this extensions for Vietnamese language?

umarizal · Post by **umarizal** » Thu May 07, 2015 1:55 pm

After using this extension as a MOD for phpbb3.0.x since 2007, much thought about it and gave up. I did a 301 redirect for over 8,000 topics and returned to the original phpBB link structure.

No use swimming against the current, talk about friendly urls with phpBB staff is like fighting windmills, despite all the other scripts too popular, both as forum for blogs, portals, among other segments, going in the opposite direction phpBB, I went back to work but standard structure.

Unfortunately, the profitability of my forum gone, but to do what? Even with redirects, in just over one week my visits have fallen 20-30% and revenues fell 50% minimum. I do not know why, but it's true, for the simple fact of having "off" friendly urls.

I will upgrade to phpBB 3.1.x this week and wait to see if the results improve.

Golden tip: Ever hear the authors of the script. Perhaps, in 2007 I had not used the friendly urls, audience growth could be slower, but today would not have major problems. Thinking about it, I will make only "visual" changes in phpBB 3.1.X not have a headache in migration to 3.2.X

Lumpy Burgertushie · Post by **Lumpy Burgertushie** » Fri May 08, 2015 12:12 am

the reason for the drop was not friendly urls versus non friendly urls. it was because of the change.

anytime your site is getting traffic and you change the urls of the pages, this will happen. the next time google comes by and indexes your site, it will come back to whatever levels your site would normally have, It may take some time to normalize.

as you said, if you had not listened to those giving you bad advice about using friendly urls in the first place you would not have this problem now.

robert

koraldon · Post by **koraldon** » Fri May 08, 2015 5:56 am

Lumpy Burgertushie wrote:the reason for the drop was not friendly urls versus non friendly urls. it was because of the change

as you said, if you had not listened to those giving you bad advice about using friendly urls in the first place you would not have this problem now.

Not sure who is giving bad advice, but your first statement is wrong.
If you implement redirects correctly, you won't see reduction in numbers. In my case I changed the forums URL when upgrading to 3.1 and saw immediate (slight) increase in traffic.

In addition google is not a magic solution like some here think. If you didn't implement redirects correctly, you are losing a lot of links, getting tons of error pages and so on. It will take months of work by you, not Google, to return to your former traffic. Do you use google web master tools?
You can consider reverting until you have a thorough update plan.

For good advice go to moz.com etc...

p.s. here is a study from moz on their own migration -
https://moz.com/rand/10-traffic-graphs- ... migration/

p.s.2. Extensions are great in 3.1 you should use them, but not for core stuff like routing. This should be done by phpbb itself.

armorm3 · Post by **armorm3** » Tue May 12, 2015 8:15 pm

I am excited to see this functionality being built into the 3.1 system as an extension, as this is an important piece/functionality in any enterprise class forum. I won't be going anywhere near this however until it is fully tested and stable release is out

There's a lot of speculation surrounding these seo-friendly-urls, or human readable urls, whichever term you prefer to use. We can all speculate about what Google does and does not include in its ranking factors. Why not just use real observations instead?

From 2010 to about March 2012, I worked for a company that proxied and translated many Fortune 500 client's websites (Delta, Best Buy, Verizon, Suntrust, Victoria's Secret, Capitol One bank, Amtrak, Delta Dental, Alaska Airlines, Next Direct, etc 100s more) A proxy is merely a machine w/ software sitting in between you and the end server. Anyways, the clients managed their English site and left all the multi-lingual sites for us to manage (they push content on the English, it automatically gets parsed and scheduled for translation in appropriate language) We used to provide a flat-fee SEO URL optimization service for the multi-lingual sites where the page title or h1 content would be placed in the URL of the pages, separated by hypens and using an ID to track the original page. Also the old/original URLs on the multilingual site would be redirected to the new/optimized/human readable URL in order to preserve existing PageRank, if any (remember subdomain = new site, but some clients were high traffic so they could easily have backlinks in the short time we worked on their url optimization)... A common practice in the industry

Now what's interesting is the case studies. Client's typically setup their multi-lingual sites using CNAME records pointed to our servers (so they ran sub-domains). From an SEO stand-point, sub-domains are considered totally different sites to search engines. A lot of clients did in fact report increases natural search traffic after using our "SEO URL Optimization" service. Let me be clear that these were technically considered new sites by search engines, and yet only a short while after deploying the sites and subsequently rolling out seo friendly urls on them, our client's Google Analytics (which marketing team has access to), showed clear increases in traffic. And our clients were happy to pay us thousands of dollars for this one-time optimzation service

Now draw from your experience. Ever seen a new domain go online, and rank high initially for keywords in the domain name? Clearly, one can see that because of the keywords in the domain name and/or URL for that matter, among other reasons (most importantly the subject of the site + some PageRank + keywords in the domain/Path/Filename) a new site will rank, and rank quickly, especially against competitor sites. Search engines would still index a site that has a link structure like phpBBs default, so it's not an issue of search engines finding and indexing a phpBB site. Rather, the issue is about using the keywords in the URL to rank higher, preferrably starting from keywords in the domain name.

Post by **Paul** » Wed May 13, 2015 6:08 pm

This topic has been marked as [ABD] - Abandoned as the extension author has not been active recently. If the extension author wishes to continue development, please PM anyone on the Extensions Team to request this topic be unlocked.

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