4 replies to this topic

[DV-Design]

What i mean is, take this post for example...

./index.php?showtopic=37138

contains goofy characters and isnt really relevantly named to the post.

is it better to have a more standard url naming for your forum pages in regards to how they get indexed and where they show in the results?

i have seen some phpbb (the scripting my forum uses) mods that proclaim to change the links to static links named with more relevant names to the topic, is this something worth installing or would it make no difference?

[Diablos]

IMO having decent structured urls is always a positive but I have seen Google crawl just about anything that is on the net, regardless of what they say. Google also tends to cut many forum posts back out of its index (or at least place it in supplemental) so even if 100% of your forum gets spidered it won't always mean you see it all as landing pages.

Short answer, nice URLs are a bonus but they WILL NOT teleport your site to higher rankings as some people suggest.

[Randy]

contains goofy characters

No goofy characters there. Those are all completely valid characters to be in a url.

isnt really relevantly named to the post

This doesn't really matter to rankings. Not nearly as much as many seem to think it does. And you'd end up placing unnecessary load on your server to do all of the extra parsing required to deliver pages of your forum, especially if it ever became busy.

If you do a forum search for something like "keyword urls" you'll find some of the seemingly hundreds of discussions we've had previously about loading up the url with keywords.

[Jill]

s it better to have a more standard url naming for your forum pages in regards to how they get indexed and where they show in the results?

It's fine. As you can see, this forum's posts are all indexed fine.

[nethy]

BTW I've recently changed a site's CMS and in the process improved moved from single parameter URLs to words (no extension). Other then a few under the hood things that have changed (no live content changes yet) due to the way the CMS outputs the html and some changes such as the way forms are coded, it's identical.

The site's improved > 20% within a couple of months, better then the stable long term trend of about 5 -10% improvement per month. There are no links within the site with URL as anchor text. Of course it's impossible to isolate URLs as a cause. But on the surface, it looks like..

Speaking of URL as anchor text, that's particularly relevant in a forum, or would be without nofolo.