Show Post URL Format

[agent47]

I don't know if this has already been requested but this is one think I envy about forums running in vBulletin forums. Since posts are in url format, example: http://www.superheroalliance.net/index.php?topic=smf-is-the-best instead of current format which is like http://www.superheroalliance.net/index.php?topic=336
Do you guys ever consider implementing this feature into SMF because I'm pretty sure this can be VERY healthy for SEO....
Will be looking forward to a response.

[kat]

Just curious...

What if there're two topics, or more, with the same title?

(Happens, here, a lot).

[Arantor]

Not to mention hurting performance.

Oh, and you should be aware that the authors of both Pretty URLs and SimpleSEF both admit there isn't really much SEO benefit...

[kat]

Everybody's SEO optimised.

Which, by it's very nature, means that nobody benefits.

[SlammedDime]

10 years ago 'pretty urls' may have been better for SEO, but as Arantor said, these days, it's a novelty for users to see pretty urls (or maybe help out with the automagical address bar in Firefox and Chrome).  SMF's default queryless urls option is sufficient if you really want a '.html' ending on your url, and SimpleSEF and PrettyUrls take it a step further by rewriting more urls and making them content filled, which isn't going to help SEO as much as having worthwhile content on your site.

[Arantor]

It doesn't make any difference in Chrome either way given that the page title gets indexed anyway.

[agent47]

You guys have made your points quite clearly but the reason I say this is because almost anything I Google, it's sites with pretty urls that show up on the top results whether they may be forums or blogs and I was wondering if that's the main reason for it..... Just my thought..... Also the issue about duplicate thread names can be easily resolved, I mean it's a system vBulletin follows.. So if vBulletin can I don't see why SMF can't

[Kindred]

pretty urls have nothing, zero, nada to do with Google's crawling or ranking.

the reason you probably see the items in your google searches is that they likely have correctly applied SEO to the parts of the page that DO count.

[Arantor]

Not even that. If someone goes to the trouble of putting pretty URLs in place, odds are they're putting in the time and effort to get decent content there.

FWIW, SEO is a fallacy on one count and a failure on forums on another. In general, you're essentially trying to beat the system, a system put in place by people far smarter than you or I, and a system that changes periodically so that you can't game the system.

Specifically for forums, you're doomed before you start - if you're writing a blog, you have control over the content, so it's nice and keyword rich if that's your thing. But a forum is predominantly user submitted content, and unless you're going to sit there and rewrite posts to make them keyword rich and search engine optimised, you have no control over it - which means you can't game the search engine system with it.

[SlammedDime]

And I'll note too that I did not make SimpleSEF with SEO in mind... it was done as a challenge and to show that a mod could be made to operate using only SMF's integration hooks.  It was the first "mod" to extensively use them.

[青山 素子]

Keywords in URLs have no SEO benefit, unless you have users finding you through a very obscure and old engine (think the old AltaVista or even older WebCrawler). Modern search engines ignore most of the areas that can be manipulated (meta keyword and description tags, URL path, etc.).

As Arantor noted, a forum is already handicapped in "optimization" because it's all user-submitted. For most forum users, posting keyword-rich optimized content is the furthest thing from their mind. Heck, how much thought did you give to making sure your topic title and post contents were nice and rich for search engines to use for ranking?

If you want to see what some of the generall-agreed search ranking factors are by importance, you should go over to SEOmoz's Search Ranking Factors article. It's due to be updated this year, by the way. Notice that the "URL" portions are all listed as "low importance".

[agent47]

Points were made crystal clear. Thanks a lot guys. Sorry if this caused any sort of inconvenience
Have a nice day all.