SEO And URLS

[glennk]

What is the best practice for urls with regard to SEO ?

Is SMF standard Urls best or is it best to use a modification like pretty urls.

Also as a long term user of pretty urls, would it be bad news for my forum to move back to the standard urls.

[Kermit]

I'm not a SEO expert,but i'd say pretty urls more appropriate for optimizing the urls

Also as a long term user of pretty urls, would it be bad news for my forum to move back to the standard urls.

Yes it would be bad news,your old index on google will/should be reindexed due to changing url behaviour

[karlbenson]

According to google, its better to use dynamic urls for dynamic software like smf.

The ONLY possible benefit is when users give you a backlink without a title, where the keywords in the url MIGHT help.
<a href="http://www.yoursite.com">http://www.yoursite.com/</a>

So I suppose it comes down to whether you find pretty urls pretty or unpretty. Chose which you prefer.

As for changing them, there will be a negative seo impact in changing to ANY form of urls.
This is because it takes search engines a while to dump all of the old style urls out of its index, and replacing with the new type.
It is important where possible to redirect old versions of urls to new versions (best using .htaccess)

[FidelGonzales]

One thing I have found is that when a forum uses SEF URLs that include the thread title and especially the category title in URL is that when administrating and modifying posts for whatever reason, the URL then changes. For particularly hot topics, you will be adversely affected and constantly worrying about SEF URLs when administrating. This is a pain.

[glennk]

This doesnt seem to be the case with pretty urls which keep the first name you put in. My real concern is lack of control over 301 redirect and that if the mod developer decide to stop working on the mod in the future you could be up the creek with no paddle.

Im not sure whats happening but since my upgrade to 2b4 I lost all my forum pages from google although my logs shows a crawling between 1 and 4000 pages a day.

I am wondering if its a good time to revert to the standard url or just stick it out. It really is a dilema as I lost so many pages from the google index.

[Dannii]

If you do change, use to reverter package to 301 redirect the pretty URLs to the standard ones.

[FidelGonzales]

This doesnt seem to be the case with pretty urls which keep the first name you put in. My real concern is lack of control over 301 redirect and that if the mod developer decide to stop working on the mod in the future you could be up the creek with no paddle.

Agree. This is one of the best reasons against its use.

What is the "reverter" package?

[FidelGonzales]

Also, speaking of converting URLs from SEF to standard URLs, what is the best way to mass or dynamically create redirects for all forum threads via .htaccess for a set of URLs within the forum, meaning redirect the URL based upon the topic number.

NEW URL
index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=87&topic=698.0

OLD URL
index.php?topic=698.0

[Dannii]

If I do stop working anyone is free to take it up, they can even do so now. It's fully open source and I can add anyone to the project so they can commit to svn.

The reverter package does what I said, redirects pretty urls to the default smf urls.

[glennk]

Where can you find the reverter Dannii. I'm still not sure what to do for the best but I would like to take a look at the reverter.

Thanks - Glenn

[Dannii]

http://code.google.com/p/prettyurls/downloads/list

[glennk]

Hi Dannii,

Thanks for the info. How would the reverter effect any future 301's I wanted to do on the forum. I know when using pretty urls its been very difficult to do standard 301 on any pages as the mod somehow interferes.

[Dannii]

If you put any of the redirects in at the top of the .htaccess it would be fine. The reverter never updates the .htaccess

[glennk]

Thanks Dannii,

I think Ill give it a go.