For about 3 and half years I have been involved in the field web marketing and specifically search engine positioning. After all these years of experience, along with many other things there is one thing that I have learned and is very clear - "When it comes to search engines, it is best to use plane .html/.htm page without any "?", "," or any special character within the URL of the web site.
I have noticed that most of the forums when browsed have at least a "?" within the url. I was wondering if it would be possible to create / update / modify PHPBB2 in any that the url will be without any special character. I have also noticed one site that has such a board - you can see it at www. webmasterworld.com/active.cgi.
Why a BB with .html/.htm and short url and no special character is recommended
- Search Engines prefers plane vanilla .html/.htm pages compared to any other type of pages.
- It is easy for search engines index all the pages and hence each and every page stands a chance of getting ranked during search query.
- Check out http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=n ... d%2Ecom%2F to see how many pages are linking back Search Engine World. Also, it is to be noted that most of the links are coming from www. webmasterworld. com that is actually a discussion board.
- Reason for short url (not too deep): the deeper the site/pages the less importance is given by search engines for ranking pages. [Example url of the post in forum: http://www.forumdomain.com/forum1/13242.html]
- One the biggest reason why this feature should be implemented is that, major search engines (Google, AltaVista, fast/all the web, ....etc) uses link popularity as a big factor for ranking a web sites. So every businesses wants a good link popularity. So it would be easy for a business/web site to get a good link popularity if they have a link coming from the header/footer of a bulletin board.
- As more and more businesses are getting aware of the potentials of search engine positioning, it would be highly recommended for PHPBB2 to easily get on big corporate web site. As even it might seem a very small issue, but there are companies who do consider such smaller but highly important issues, that will effect their long term presence on the net.
Thanks you for your support.
Vishal Thakkar