Implemented Please provide the Standard URL option

[AndyB]

I hope there will be an option in the admin cp to choose Standard URLs. I really dislike Friendly URLs and hope we are not forced to use them on our own forums.

Perhaps Kier or Mike could provide and example of what the Standard URL would look like to display the following:

1) a forum
2) a thread
3) a post within a thread
4) an attachment

Thank you.

 

[Carlos]

How about vbSEO? Hm? Friendly URL has been a part of the whole SEO shenanigan since I've been reading up about it for a full two years before jumping to this conclusion.

Many websites have said the best SEO tactic to have in your arsenal is the url structure, so I took that advice and never looked back.

 

[Forsaken]

How about vbSEO? Hm? Friendly URL has been a part of the whole SEO shenanigan since I've been reading up about it for a full two years before jumping to this conclusion.

Many websites have said the best SEO tactic to have in your arsenal is the url structure, so I took that advice and never looked back.

Re-read what I consider credible; vBSEO doesn't fall under that.

Find one official statement. 

 

[Carlos]

You're a tough sport.

 

[Forsaken]

I'll say sorry for being a jerk in the one post, but statements like these get annoying (Theres been about 6 others here).

Its a myth; Google will not penalize anyone for using one url structure over another. 

 

[Carlos]

This is exactly what I said earlier:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/...imized-results/5966/

The first sentence in the body text and the first words used per sentence are the most important ones for advanced on-page SEO necessities (Make it humanly readable and SE readable — The words used in the first sentence are most important due to the implementation of Google’s LSI algorithm)

http://knol.google.com/k/seo-overview#

Search Engine Optimization - On-site: the process of optimizing; meta keywords, HTML tags, descriptions robots.txt file, body text, URL structure, H1-H6, internal site links, outbound link texts, image alt texts, and keyword density of a website.

I believe that's a google domain name - a subdomain!!!

*reloads shotgun* Any more?

 

[Forsaken]

http://knol.google.com/k/seo-overview#

I believe that's a google domain name - a subdomain!!!

*reloads shotgun* Any more?

That isn't an article by Google, thats an article on one of their services.

 

[Carlos]

You're trying to beat around the bush. Fine.

I can't find it in search, but I see google categorizing SEO and friendly url's in the same places everywhere.

This is a SEO guide by google - Guess if friendly URL's are part of the guide or not.

The domain name has usercontent on it, but it is validated by google in their Blog. This means, google ACKNOWLEDGES that friendly URL is part of the whole SEO shenanigan.

Doing a whois search on googleusercontent yields that Google owns the domain. Go figure.

I rest my case.

 

[Kier]

If it was a myth, then Kier, and InternetBrands wouldn't champion the 'friendly URL' feature.

Please refer to what I have said in the recent past:

It drives me nuts that a whole industry exists on the premise that Google is some kind of idiotic entity that needs to be force-fed content in some kind of 'magic format' in order for it to index it. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The idea that URL format a is in some way favourable to format b is frankly laughable. Provided your URLs work (ie: reliably point to content) and are not a billion characters long, Google will index them without a problem. Further, it would be ridiculous for search engines to in some way prioritise the content of a URL string over the content of the page to which it points, and surprise surprise, no search engines do so.

There was a time when URLs that included textual references to their content were called human readable. Nothing has actually changed since then.

I have yet to see any empirical evidence to substantiate such a claim.
I think if you suggested to any search engine developer that his search engine was not able to index example.com/randomasdasdasda/asadsad?a=1&b=2222&c=33 just as readily as example.com/my-human-readable-url/page-16 they would probably feel somewhat insulted.

XenForo uses human-readable URLs for the convenience of humans. I don't believe it has any relevance to search engine rankings whatsoever. If it did, search engines would be ridiculously game-able.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

The only difference with URL's nowadays from my own extensive testing, is purely whether dynamic characters are used or not. SE's still index far more URL's that do not use several dynamic characters, ie. static based URL structure, however; keywords or not have zip to do with real relevance nowadays due to what Kier already mentioned, in that when that was released years ago it did game the SE's for a brief period, then they ripped it out. Yes, it is part of the algorithm still that Matt Cutts has mentioned, being Google's main algorithm engineer, however; the position difference would be maybe one or two only if the same exact words are shown on the page and then the entire semantic connectivity of the page would require to meet the exact term used in the URL + search term provided. Basically... it may make-up 0.001 of the overall factors associated to rank the page, as it is estimated that in excess of 1000 mathematical factors are used per page to derive its ranking.

 

[Forsaken]

You're trying to beat around the bush. Fine.
 
I can't find it in search, but I see google categorizing SEO and friendly url's in the same places everywhere.
 
This is a SEO guide by google - Guess if friendly URL's are part of the guide or not.
 
The domain name has usercontent on it, but it is validated by google in their Blog. This means, google ACKNOWLEDGES that friendly URL is part of the whole SEO shenanigan.
 
Doing a whois search on googleusercontent yields that Google owns the domain. Go figure.
 
I rest my case.

Question was to find where they penalize for use of one URL structure over another (Which would be the only reason they would promote a site in PR over another).

And I'm not beating around the bush, I asked a specific question, which you've yet to find anything relating to yet. If you can't, then you have no weight to your claim.

Something to realize about the SEO/SEM profession; most of the crap is unfound claims, or just purely good practice for the -end-user-.

People need to stop thinking of search engines, and focus more on optimizing their site for their users, because that is much of what Google looks for.  
 

 

[James]

Just to add to the friendly vs. unfriendly URLs, the document that Carlos linked to states:

Improve the structure of your URLs
Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help
you keep your site better organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by search engines. Also, it can create easier, "friendlier" URLs for those that want to link to your content. Visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words.

It then continues to state:

Some users might link to your page using the URL of that page as the anchor text. If your URL
contains relevant words, this provides users and search engines with more information about the
page than an ID or oddly named parameter would.

This basically states that /thread/title.id provides more information than showthread.php?t=id
But of course, the main point that everyone agrees on:

Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other
factors discussed here. Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other
users to it. This could be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means.
Organic or word-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site's reputation with both users and Google,
and it rarely comes without quality content.

This article also links to URL Structure. Hopefully I managed to clear up some confusion.

Having words in your URLs helps more than IDs because if you have a page:
www.mydomain.com/threads/this-is-a-thread.123 which is exactly the same as www.mydomain.com/threads/123. If a user searches Google for a thread, your friendly URL has more chance of being displayed as it contains these words specifically.

Content > all, though.

 

[Floris]

canonical urls, ftw

 

[0ptima]

Content is king, not "seo friendly" urls. My content rich forums rank #1 in google and I use the standard vb 3 urls.

 

[AndyB]

If you want to avoid the use of URL rewriting entirely, insert 'index.php?' after 'community/' so that you have the following format:

http://xenforo.com/community/index.php?forums/5/

Just for you, Andy
View attachment 1054

Hi Kier,

Would you be so kind as to make sure that with the friendly URL feature disabled, we can avoid URL rewriting entirely.

Thank you.

 

[James]

Andy it's disabled by default I believe.

 

[dutchbb]

If you want optimal ranking in Google and other SE, you better keep the title in the URL. I think that's a bit more important than anything else.

 

[AndyB]

Andy it's disabled by default I believe.

Hi James,

What I'm asking is that when set up our own xenForo forums, if we decide to disable the friendly URL feature we will be able to have standard URLs like this:

http://xenforo.com/community/index.php?forums/5/

This way we don't have to have a .htaccess file and do any URL rewriting.

 

[AndyB]

If you want optimal ranking in Google and other SE, you better keep the title in the URL. I think that's a bit more important than anything else.

Hi Dutchbb,

There are plenty of very experienced forum owners with highly successful forums that will argue that friendly URLs have absolutely zero benefit. In addition some forum owners like myself would prefer to have short consistent URLs as opposed to long ugly URLs that have the thread title crammed in there.

 

[James]

Hi James,

What I'm asking is that when set up our own xenForo forums, if we decide to disable the friendly URL feature we will be able to have standard URLs like this:

http://xenforo.com/community/index.php?forums/5/

This way we don't have to have a .htaccess file and do any URL rewriting.

If you want short URLs why not use:
http://xenforo.com/community/forums/5/
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/2333

These are, of course, much shorter than if you have index.php? appended after your forums directory.

XenForo comes with an option to disable titles in URLs (so you will be presented with the URLs I showed above) but I don't believe it comes with an option to use the index.php? appended after the forum directory.

I understand SEO isn't an issue for you but I don't see why you would want index.php spoiling the user-friendliness of the URLs I posted above. If you don't want them URLs for SEO, have them for your users

 

[Chromaniac]

i limit it to 5 words on my forum through vbseo. though, good content with proper titles is very important.