Subdirectory Slugs For Threads Like Wordpress

[Anomandaris]

Right now, all threads are in a massive /threads/ URL subdirectory.

This is not good for SEO purposes. Google Search Algorithm takes this into consideration.

If you have a large amount of poor quality posts in /threads/ and you have 5 really high quality posts, the poor quality ones will hurt the rankings of the high quality posts, due to how the algorithm acts upon URL subdirectories.

In addition is clearly dictates to google that all pages in that subdirectory are related. Right now you can have wildly different content in the /threads/ directory because it's used for all sub forums. This doesn't show google the relevancy of the threads in each specific forum section.

If I have a website about animals and I have two forum sections: dogs, and cats

I expect all threads about dogs to be in /dogs/ and all threads about cats to be in /cats/.

So:

animals.com/cats/top-5-best-cat-food-brands/
animals.com/dogs/understanding-dog-behavior/

The same thing should be applied to the resource manager, galleries, etc...

This is how most modern CMS operate and I think you'll agree that the XF forum is filled with feedback showing XF clients want it to be more like a modern CMS.

I see over the past 2 years a large focus on improving the SEO of XF, and you'll see many suggestions and complaints about SEO related issues, so I think this is something to think about for the future. With Google destroying small publishers with every new google algorithm update, it's imperative that everything is done to keep our forums competitive.

 

[Chromaniac]

tbh, google now has proper schema markup for discussion forums. and xenforo has implemented it in recent versions.

Discussion Forum (DiscussionForumPosting) Schema Markup | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google for Developers

You can use discussion forum structured data to help Google understand your community forum content.

developers.google.com

this thread has this for instance. small part of a large schema code relevant to this thread's category.

 "@type": "DiscussionForumPosting",
        "@id": "https://xenforo.com/community/threads/subdirectory-slugs-for-threads-like-wordpress.221286/",
        "headline": "Subdirectory Slugs For Threads Like Wordpress",
        "datePublished": "2024-04-30T01:28:51+00:00",
        "url": "https://xenforo.com/community/threads/subdirectory-slugs-for-threads-like-wordpress.221286/",
        "articleSection": "XenForo suggestions",

also to the best of my understanding, wordpress has never by default included category for posts in the post url. it has always had /year/month/date/post-title as default for post slugs.

 

[Arantor]

The problem with this is if you then move topics between sections, you now have to be able to resolve both the old and new URLs and make one redirect to the other. Not tragic for new topics but poor for topics that have been around a while then get moved.