Reasons:
People read left to right (well, we do in English).
Therefore, better to see /threads/thread-title
than /threads/{meaningless-number}-thread-title
Sorry, but after thinking about this for several days, I do not find this a fair or accurate comparison. I am not a programmer but an English speaker with a degree in literature. (Who reluctantly has learned something about SEO, HTML and all that.) I agree with the "dot instead of dash or slash" argument. But I cannot agree with this "words before numbers" argument. As I see it, the more accurate comparison is:
/threads/meaningless-thread-title.{meaningless-number}
/threads/{meaningless-number}.meaningless-thread-title
And I personally would put it this way:
greatbritain/london/streets/baker/221.attn-sherlock-holmes-unless-moriarty-pinches-it-first
Honestly please, the so-called "thread title" that we end up with in these URLs is not meaningful to nobody except "maybe" a search engine. (Pardon my English.) Whenever I use these URLs, I am mainly looking to lop off the silly words. (Which I cannot even make out, beyond the extreme end of my address bar.) Also, seems to me likely that soon, if not already, the proprietary and ever-changing search engine algorithms will stop reading long URLs after a certain amount of words.
Suppose I find a thread with important information. I like to post the URL for my friends in my blog, on my howto website, etc. I like the fact that I can edit--or entirely remove--the words. Also, to my knowledge. making your URLs friendly to people who want to link to your site--but whose "hypertext" you cannot control--is where the real SEO power comes. Also sometimes you can post on newsgroups and get into an important high-ranking archival site--in which case you can not choose any "hypertext" but just the naked URL. Obviously, you want to pare this down to the essential SEO-value words for your context. Otherwise you will annoy people with your over obvious SEO-gimmicky auto-generated URL.
And so I suggest the text should go at the end because then the human eye, which does indeed read left-to-write, much more easily sees what part he can chop down or lop off, as desired. And because the machines involved really do not care.
The only thing I don't like is the length of url titles. I hope there's a way to limit/crop the length of titles.
I second the motion. There are 3 obvious ways this might be done.
1. An admin option for x number of words maximum to show in the URL.
2. And / or : maintain a database of "most commonly searched words"--which database can further be reduced by each forum according to the forum's subject matter--and thus program the XF to pick out the most search-relevant words for the URL and for each forum.
3. Or (ideally) TWO title/subject fields for the "new thread":
Title (subject or main point): ___[very limited length]___
Subtitle (details or reason why?) ____[longer character length]_____
"Title" and "Subtitle" are then combined on the XF forum display list. I.e. the resulting thread list "looks" the same to humans as it does now... But in the URL, only the "title" is used...
Please note that suggestion 3 ameliorates TWO ubiquities:
a. Reduces URL length, to feed only the most meaningful words to search engines. (Human chosen.)
b. Encourages members to make more effort to create a useful title. I.e., instead of the usual "Please help!" or "How about this?"--just maybe more people will say what they are talking about in the "subtitle." Thus more people can know whether they are interested without having to click on half the titles!
Also, in my opinion, it is better for long-term SEO relevance to be "human chosen." You do not usually have a prayer to show up on the first page of search results for the "most searched" terms. Forums have a distinct advantage in the SEO game in that they generate "new" terms not yet optimized for--and also use "niche" terms that no SEO expert bothers with.
I.e., while encouraging each forum participant to "human choose" the most relevant words to his discussion (by requiring a short title), perhaps you might maximize the unique "niche" SEO capability of forum software, as well as increase human friendliness (by requiring a subtitle).
