SEF/SEO URLs

[Lumpy Burgertushie]

That 10% that have decent keywords in the titles/content will already be picked up by google without needing a "pretty" URL.

google picks up the titles already but they will be buried 1000 pages deep unless they include keywords that people are searching for.

Remember, nobody searches for your board, they search for keywords/phrases. So google brings them what they search for. If your board has those keywords/phrases in things like the titles and descriptions, which by default display prominently on the page, then your board will show up higher in the listings than a board that does not. What the actual URL is , really doesn't matter very much.

Keep in mind that all of this is only a part of SEO. Backlinks from other sites with keyword rich ,relevant content is just as important these days. Backlinks with anchor text using keywords is also very important.

The whole idea that you need "pretty" URLs is old stuff. Search engines don't care, most people don't care.

People click on links, they don't type them in. They don't try to remember them etc. etc.


robert

[lurttinen]

This is an old topic here. Do you need pretty URLs or not?

Has anyone done a before/after check with their page ranks and whatnot's?
Surely there is a way to measure this in plain numbers rather than debating if it is any good or not?

Would be interesting to see what the results are after you install a pretty-url-MOD compared to the vanilla.
Or whatever SEO thingies they are called.

[KevC]

One of my sites has a rival. We have very similar user and post counts. We have very similar forums and topics and the boards were started only a couple of months apart.
They use 'seo friendly' URLs and I don't.

I have a slightly higher page rank and I come out on top for a google search for the same terms. Most notably a search for '<keyword> forum'.

If it made such a big deal they would beat me every time on that.

[lurttinen]

Your forum before and after the pretty.
Not just similar sites.

[Pony99CA]

Your forum before and after the pretty.
Not just similar sites.

Making the change would probably break your links for a while unless you had a good redirect scheme set up.

A "better" experiment would be to start a new board about some weird topic (Moldavian pet rocks? UPDATE: That has 7290 hits in Google!) and create two copies, one standard phpBB and the other with an SEO MOD. Make them share the database to guarantee identical content. Whenever you link to one, link to the other. Submit both to Google, then see which one gets listed highest in the search results. (You want to do this without getting lots of backlinks from random places, because that would affect page rank.)

Steve

[lurttinen]

As long as the result can be measured and this old debate put to sleep...
Anyone up to the task?

[OC2PS]

As long as the result can be measured and this old debate put to sleep...

Amen to that, brother.

[GoBieN]

What does googlebot say about different domains/URL's with the same content.
Because if you share the database that is what you get.

[Lumpy Burgertushie]

from what I have read around the net, google doesn't really care that much about duplicate content.

under certain circumstances, you could get penalized for it but only if you are trying to spam google with sales pages, etc.


robert

[Dog Cow]

from what I have read around the net, google doesn't really care that much about duplicate content.

Goooogle has some patented processes for detecting duplicate content. Here they are:

Document near-duplicate detection #7,707,157
Document similarity detection #7,734,627
Detecting query-specific duplicate documents #7,779,002
Phrase-based detection of duplicate documents in an information retrieval system #7,711,679
Duplicate document detection in a web crawler system #7,627,613

One may read the abstract, claims, etc. at USPTO.gov

[OC2PS]

Guys, I've created a feature request in 3.2 discussions http://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic ... 05&t=35616

Please, can you weigh in there?

P.S.

http://www.google.com/support/webmaster ... swer=76329
Consider organizing your content so that URLs are constructed logically and in a manner that is most intelligible to humans (when possible, readable words rather than long ID numbers). For example, if you're searching for information about aviation, a URL like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation will help you decide whether to click that link. A URL like http://www.example.com/index.php?id_sez ... f849f730f1, is much less appealing to users.

Consider using punctuation in your URLs. The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.

[callumacrae]

There is an SEO URL modification, but it sucks

~Callum

[phpDummie]

...People don't actually type URLs in any more so they really make no difference though. ...

You may be underestimating some people like, say, me.

If you want to revisit a page but do not have it bookmarked and only remember what the subject was about, you can type a partial word in the FireFox address and it will come up with some matches. You will only need to pick the right one from the list. Of course this is not per se 'typing the URL' but still.

[Lumpy Burgertushie]

...People don't actually type URLs in any more so they really make no difference though. ...

You may be underestimating some people like, say, me.

If you want to revisit a page but do not have it bookmarked and only remember what the subject was about, you can type a partial word in the FireFox address and it will come up with some matches. You will only need to pick the right one from the list. Of course this is not per se 'typing the URL' but still.

but that has nothing to do with SEO. That has to do with your memory and the memory of your browser.


robert

[callumacrae]

...People don't actually type URLs in any more so they really make no difference though. ...

You may be underestimating some people like, say, me.

If you want to revisit a page but do not have it bookmarked and only remember what the subject was about, you can type a partial word in the FireFox address and it will come up with some matches. You will only need to pick the right one from the list. Of course this is not per se 'typing the URL' but still.

You don't need SEO urls for that - firefox also searches the page titles

~Callum