Lack of interest Friendly URLS: Don't change URL when changing title

[Anomandaris]

Friendly URLs are great for users and most people prefer using them.

Very bad for SEO. Why?

If you change the title, the URL changes.

But Anomandaris, it does a 301 redirect to the new URL.

If Google crawls this new URL before they crawl the old URL, it treats it as a new URL.

In order for the rankings of the previous page to pass to the new page, it must crawl the old URL first, register the 301 redirect and pass the rank to the new URL.

Solution:

Don't change the URL when changing title.

This can also be solved by not using Friendly URLs, but I think everyone agrees Friendly URLs are the way to go

 

[djbaxter]

That's just silly.

The way it is now works just fine and makes more sense than what you are suggesting.

 

[Chromaniac]

i actually stopped using title in url because of this problem. i like how wordpress treats it. once you submit the post, the title becomes permanent unless you change it manually. i have posted this before and the response was not encouraging.

the problem with xenforo nice-urls is also that they can get awfully big if the title of the thread is very long. a limit on slug length would have been nice as well.

but i am happy going with just thread ids. it does become annoying when i am trying to fix dead links because i can no longer guess the topic of the thread from the url.