Keywords in URL good for "Google:Keyword"?

[Marcus]

I guess its true. My forum is domain.com with the largest active community about my topic. However others created new keyword-xx.com communities which now rank higher on some very important Google search requests, although the community is less active, brand new and there is not that good specific topic available about keyword.

 

[Carlos]

Well, beef up your content. Google loves quality content.

And secondly, make it a point to target the keywords that they're trying to target... through your welcome notice, your meta description, and browser strip (where your favicon and site name resides).

Let me put it this way, recently, I changed parts of my site from "Black Ops 2" to "Call of Duty Ghosts." Guess what? My rank for BO2 still remains - even with the changes. Over the weekend, when I was away, I saw more threads being created even though the Google Analytics stats tell me that the traffic has taken a hit.

 

[JulianD]

Yeah the best suggestion is to improve your content. Google is a black box and nobody outside Google knows how they work.

Maybe your competitor is using black hat seo techniques or maybe they are doing pretty well in social networks and that's bumping up their results. Who knows

 

[Carlos]

Maybe your competitor is using black hat seo techniques or maybe they are doing pretty well in social networks and that's bumping up their results. Who knows

I thought the same thing, but wasn't really sure.

 

[Marcus]

We are talking about a fast 10 year and over a million post xenforo forum against a new rather slow stock vb4. Coming from there on my own, I do know xenforo is better at seo.

There is another catch: Lots of users enter just "keyword" in their browser, enter return and then get the google results (where then mostly my community is on top of them). But then, there is a "keyword-xx.com" suggestion always on top if the user visited that community before, even if the user only visited that community once, and my community all day long. The other keyword-xx.com community is always suggested first.

 

[Carlos]

My competitor uses a stock vb4. Coming from there on my own, I do know xenforo is better at seo.

There is another catch: Lots of users enter just "keyword" in their browser, enter return and then get the google results (where then mostly my community is on top of them). But then, there is a "keyword-xx.com" suggestion always on top if the user visited that community before, even if the user only visited that community once, and my community all day long. The other keyword-xx.com community is always suggested first.

This is based on the cookie of the user. The user must clear the previously visited caches of their browser in order to see your search better.

I came from vB4, too. I also do know xenForo's SEO is better. And that's coming from a guy who used vBSEO.

 

[Marcus]

VBSEO made some guys rich, but having it going through the whole page output on every page load and preg_match everything made my site so slow and wasn't worth it for me. I switched back to stock vb4 urls and preferred it. Currently I use forum/1234 and threads/1234 as my urls. Maybe using keywords in urls do matter today. I thought otherwise.

 

[Carlos]

VBSEO made some guys rich, but having it going through the whole page output on every page load and preg_match everything made my site so slow and wasn't worth it for me. I switched back to stock vb4 urls and preferred it. Currently I use forum/1234 and threads/1234 as my urls. Maybe using keywords in urls do matter today. I thought otherwise.

In my humble opinion, yes, they do better. Especially if you use it on facebook/twitter.

I agree that vBSEO was slow. It used to be fast with vB3, but with vB4... Off the charts. *shakes head*

 

[Anthony Parsons]

We are talking about a fast 10 year and over a million post xenforo forum against a new rather slow stock vb4. Coming from there on my own, I do know xenforo is better at seo.

What you see and what another views in search results, are quite different things. As you outlined, you will see results ordered differently based on what you have visited, compared with someone next to you who hasn't visited a site before, or a town over, a city away, state away, country... results vary significantly.

Everyone thinks their site should be higher than the next new site that comes along, except, that is an old ideology that got knocked off long ago when all these old, established sites, disappeared never to be seen again because they were living off of old stale content that wasn't being heavily posted any longer.

People are fickle, and Google is as well nowadays. Google are always chasing the next big thing for their search results, hence you won't constantly live in the top results regardless how good you think your site is, or page, or quality... others MUST be given their moment to see what users do. Google constantly assess how users interact with sites... and adjust accordingly and constantly.

 

[Marcus]

Some odd thing I noticed: On some results, my last forum description (I have several hundred forums) is used as the general site description for domain.com, and only because this node description is the longest. It does not describe my community at all. I see I have to put some written text about the community on the first page.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

Google typically use what they deem to be the most accurate description... you should have a short, sharp and concise meta description on the homepage, which they will often use if accurate and well written describing your overall site. If you stack it with keywords or such, they will discard it immediately.

 

[Marcus]

Just some brainstorming: I guess its better to use thread redirects for some days so Google gets a 303 for merged content. Actually this is exactly the thing a sitemap would be useful for: To give Google a 303 update for this, before the thread redirects disappear and the spiders have to figure it themself (one non-permission page for the old thread, and having the content merged into a new thread).