forum URL and SEO

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  • pk698
    Senior Member
    • Apr 2003
    • 177

    forum URL and SEO

    I was having an argument with a friend about proper ways of naming the forum URL.

    he has it as: hisdomain.com/forum.

    and I suggested that he rename it to hisdomain.com/video-cards-forum because it is more SEO friendly and helps google find you. This way the search bots know what your forum is about, even though there are already keywords inside your topics. Every little thing helps.

    But he doesn't seem to agree.

    Any thoughts on this?
  • Loco.M
    Senior Member
    • Mar 2005
    • 4319
    • 3.5.x

    #2
    I would try to make the url's as short as possible... forum.site.com would be best IMO
    -- Web Developer for hire
    ---Online Marketing Tools and Articles

    Comment

    • Andy Huang
      Senior Member
      • Feb 2004
      • 4602

      #3
      There is no such thing as "SEO friendly" urls. Search engines are computer programs that takes in strings for URL, and records the contents. The URL you proposed is at most "human friendly" where people can maybe remember it easier than something else; but then again, with all the hyphans and words, its too complicated, and short /forum or as above suggested forum.site.com would be good (personally, I prefer "forums" instead, but that's a whole different argument).

      The OLD arguments of SEO for URL naming like the one you suggested is due to parameters appended AFTER the file extension; so for example these stuff in red:
      Code:
      http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php[COLOR="Red"]?t=240867[/COLOR]
      At one point in history, when dynamic contents first starting to popup around the web (think way back in 2000/199x's, when you first saw perl/cgi powered webpages that can act dynamically), search engines did not know how to handle them properly, and so it was necessairy to "SEO" the URL by making them more "search engine friendly" using mod_rewrite or alike tools to convert:
      Code:
      http://www.someoldsite.ext/order.pl[COLOR="Red"]?step=1&cartid=123adf12[/COLOR]
      Into:
      Code:
      http://www.someoldsite.ext/order[COLOR="Red"]/1/123adf12/[/COLOR]
      However, as time went by, search engines spiders can handle these parameters no problem already, so it is no longer needed to be done. All the major search engine's webmaster guides, in fact, tells webmasters to worry about website content, not website url.

      If you absolutely want to do it, no one will stop you; but there is definetly no real need to do it anymore.
      Best Regards,
      Andy Huang

      Comment

      • Dean C
        Senior Member
        • Mar 2002
        • 4571
        • 3.5.x

        #4
        I have to disagree Andy. Keywords in the URL of your website holds more value than a query string. It has been said numerous times by many people who work for the search engines
        Dean Clatworthy - Web Developer/Designer

        Comment

        • jeffinj
          Senior Member
          • Apr 2006
          • 841
          • 4.0.0

          #5
          Originally posted by Dean C
          I have to disagree Andy. Keywords in the URL of your website holds more value than a query string. It has been said numerous times by many people who work for the search engines
          I agree with Dean C on this. But IMO those keyword should be in the main domain name. The sub-domain names are not as important as the main one.

          I would prefer tying www.hisname.com/forum or forum.hisname.com rather than www.hisname.com/some_thing_forum.
          www.christianforumsite.com
          sigpic

          Comment

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