Does "Content Title in URLs" really important in SEO?

[agison]

I have lots of bad experiences with Friendly URL which has Content title words. It caused some issues :

• Server performance to normalize, encode & replace UTF-8 Characters (My forum language is Vietnamese)
• Changing Forum structure
• Change Thread title
• Uprade & moving to another platform.

I have a question: Does "Content Title in URLs" really important in SEO?

Is it safe to disable this feature?
(I used them with VBSEO before I move to Xenforo)

 

[Jake Bunce]

The content titles are more for humans than search engines. To my knowledge content titles in URLs are not functional with respect to SEO. I disable that option on my forum.

 

[thebush]

How about Wordpress, they have friendly url's as default option.

 

[Andre Daub]

google highlights them in the serps, so i would recomend to use them, not for better rankings, but for a better ctr in the serps.

 

[agison]

After more investigation, I decided to remove them all to keep things simple.

 

[dutchbb]

Yes it has influence, and it's not even something they keep secret. Like said in the SERPS it's very obvious that it matters to the ranking. IMO the arguments against it you bring up do not outweigh the benefits. But ultimately it's a personal choice and it's not like it will have a huge impact.

Title tag of the page and content on the page, together with PageRank I'd say are probably 95% of SEO.

 

[Jake Bunce]

Is there documentation somewhere that says URLs contribute to page rank? This is counter-intuitive to me. The URL is an address for content. I would think that content is what matters, not the address.

 

[Andre Daub]

Yes you are right. It has nothing to do with Pagerank. And Pagerank is not all.
There are sites with low pr having nice traffic, and many sites with high pr getting nothing out of it.