TheLaw
Well-known member
Here's an interesting one and I'm sure that this was thought out 274 times by the genius developers here before settling on the current system.
I've wondered about best SEO practices and whether threads are better than posts or vice versa to canonicalize urls for submission to search engines. As of right now, content accessibility via duplicate URLs cannot happen in the manner in which posts are indexed. The hash provides an in-page link to anchor text (aka a jump link) to all the posts on that page of a thread and not to a separate post on its own page. So one can think of threads as having multiple pages, each page consists of 10 posts which are referenced as on page links. On other forums we know, there are links that will open up a page consisting only of that post and you can think of a thread page as a separate URL that generates a chronological ordering of 10 separate posts.
One thought is that threads should be indexed because those are the topics of conversation and the posts are just subparts of a thread. That would seem a logical manner of order for humans. It also avoids duplicate content on two urls (all the posts on the page are understood to be places on a page, not 10 pages appearing as part of one page.) But I'm wondering whether for SE purposes if a post option might be more effective. As such, posts would have their own URL instead of being a page and are indexed based upon post number. Currently page 5 of a thread looks like this:
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/the-lol-thread.3813/page-5
Right now, going to post 5 looks like this:
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/the-lol-thread.3813/#post-58595
As a post under what I'm suggesting, a URL would look like this:
the-lol-thread.3813/post-5
There are gurus far beyond me but I am wondering whether 25-500 word posts might index more effectively than 10 post pages that may contain as many as 3,000 - 8,000 words. Just a thought to throw out there. I wonder since some software seems to index better even though it seems less efficient although it might be due to lack of quick movement to adherence of standards.
I've wondered about best SEO practices and whether threads are better than posts or vice versa to canonicalize urls for submission to search engines. As of right now, content accessibility via duplicate URLs cannot happen in the manner in which posts are indexed. The hash provides an in-page link to anchor text (aka a jump link) to all the posts on that page of a thread and not to a separate post on its own page. So one can think of threads as having multiple pages, each page consists of 10 posts which are referenced as on page links. On other forums we know, there are links that will open up a page consisting only of that post and you can think of a thread page as a separate URL that generates a chronological ordering of 10 separate posts.
One thought is that threads should be indexed because those are the topics of conversation and the posts are just subparts of a thread. That would seem a logical manner of order for humans. It also avoids duplicate content on two urls (all the posts on the page are understood to be places on a page, not 10 pages appearing as part of one page.) But I'm wondering whether for SE purposes if a post option might be more effective. As such, posts would have their own URL instead of being a page and are indexed based upon post number. Currently page 5 of a thread looks like this:
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/the-lol-thread.3813/page-5
Right now, going to post 5 looks like this:
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/the-lol-thread.3813/#post-58595
As a post under what I'm suggesting, a URL would look like this:
the-lol-thread.3813/post-5
There are gurus far beyond me but I am wondering whether 25-500 word posts might index more effectively than 10 post pages that may contain as many as 3,000 - 8,000 words. Just a thought to throw out there. I wonder since some software seems to index better even though it seems less efficient although it might be due to lack of quick movement to adherence of standards.
