Xenforo & SEO

[Taylor J]

I need more like buttons for this post.

I tried a trick I heard on youtube if you shift click it it keeps getting liked. (joking )

I dunno.. I was getting kinda scared. Was about to look for a bomb shelter before it got real dangerous in here

I was eating popcorn the whole time lol.


But back on topic, no, the url structure has nothing to do with your sites rank anymore, used to, but not anymore.

 

[Carlos]

But back on topic, no, the url structure has nothing to do with your sites rank anymore, used to, but not anymore.

I tried to say that it's instrumental, not as much. It's like someone else said in another thread regarding GWT: "no it's not a "must have" but a "good to have" thing."

Friendly URL to me, accelerates the growth of the site. It's not "one size fits all" kind of thing, but it helps.

But people want to belittle me and call me stupid by the end of the day, as usual!

Just when I'm trying to help.

 

[Marcus]

I believe the url title is of some minor importance to seo. However I am using xenforos friendly urls without the title. I use forum/1234/ and thread/4321/ as urls as I just personally think they are more beautiful when the title is not included. It's a matter of personal taste today, I like shorter URLs.

 

[Mikey]

I've seen a forum which uses XenForo's /threads/123 do just as well as another forum which uses XenForo's /threads/this-is-my-test-thread.123/ - that part makes no difference

 

[Kier]

Friendly / pretty / human readable URLs are for human benefit, not search engines. End of story.

 

[yavuz]

Friendly / pretty / human readable URLs are for human benefit, not search engines. End of story.

Maybe a point for another matter. I'd love XenForo to have the option to replace non-english charachters. Maybe the search engines are reading these links correctly, acknowledge the thread titles but it's unconfortable when you like to copy links and paste them somewhere.We are all about user experience, so with long thread titles containing lot of "non-english" charachters the thread title goes on and on, looking really ugly:

Originally
/kaledeki-yalnızlık.30290/
XenForo Link
/kaledeki-yaln%C4%B1zl%C4%B1k.30290/
Should be
/kaledeki-yalnizlik.30290/

 

[digitalpoint]

To answer the original question, XenForo's SEO is very good right out of the box. I have not run into anything major yet that needs to fixed/changed.

Maybe a point for another matter. I'd love XenForo to have the option to replace non-english charachters. Maybe the search engines are reading these links correctly, acknowledge the thread titles but it's unconfortable when you like to copy links and paste them somewhere.We are all about user experience, so with long thread titles containing lot of "non-english" charachters the thread title goes on and on, looking really ugly:

Originally
/kaledeki-yalnızlık.30290/
XenForo Link
/kaledeki-yaln%C4%B1zl%C4%B1k.30290/
Should be
/kaledeki-yalnizlik.30290/

That's really a browser issue more than anything I think. For example in Chrome it shows the non-latin characters just fine in the browser URL bar.

 

[Carlos]

I've seen a forum which uses XenForo's /threads/123 do just as well as another forum which uses XenForo's /threads/this-is-my-test-thread.123/ - that part makes no difference

Friendly / pretty / human readable URLs are for human benefit, not search engines. End of story.

As I have said in one of the posts I made: Not one size fits all.

In my experience, I have found that MW3Blog has been able to attract keywords relating to the subject at hand in the URL structure. One of my forums has done the same twice already.

I understand that friendly/pretty/human readable URL structures benefit the human. But, on the other hand, it DOES help in bringing traffic in some form. That has been my conviction since I got into this debate.

 

[Deepmartini]

Xenforo includes Microdata/RDF , and breadcrumb data.

What's microdata/RDF?

 

[Robbo]

As I have said in one of the posts I made: Not one size fits all.

In my experience, I have found that MW3Blog has been able to attract keywords relating to the subject at hand in the URL structure. One of my forums has done the same twice already.

I understand that friendly/pretty/human readable URL structures benefit the human. But, on the other hand, it DOES help in bringing traffic in some form. That has been my conviction since I got into this debate.

Yes. But not as SEO. Which I have stated. It benefits people seeing a link and going to the site not a search engine. So much for no one agreeing with me right?

 

[Slavik]

Yes. But not as SEO. Which I have stated. It benefits people seeing a link and going to the site not a search engine. So much for no one agreeing with me right?

I agree with you Robbo, because you are right

 

[mrGTB]

Explain to me, how do I make Carlos360 successful on an ugly url structure that comes packaged with wordpress?

carlos360.com/post#1242

Explain, go!

I develop websites from the ground up, too... So what you're saying is that my tactics are wrong. Right?

Answer this question then?

If having the keywords is so important for SEO included in the URL, tell me why sites like IMDb don't use them for movie titles? Such as this page here for the movie called: Dune (1984). Yet, if you search for movie titles on the web using Google I'll bet you 7 or 8 times out of 10 IMDb will be listed Number 1 result for that movie your searching for, or at least in the top 3 results.

If you look at some of the biggest and most popular sites on the web you'll see that most don't use keywords in URL's. Ask yourself why they don't if they matter that much towards SEO ranking. About the only thing that matters is having the Thread ID included to avoid duplicate content URL titles and also for use with Google News.

 

[Carlos]

Older sites don't really need them. Especially these larger companies. IMDB has been in the business for over 10 years. The site was launched in 1990. These older sites are usually owned by larger corporations, therefore the amount of advertising dollars they spend each month brings them these unique visitors into the site. After they've reached the PR10 level, I don't think they need to accomplish that goal of newer sites trying to push PR levels up and up.

Newer sites need to do whatever they need to do in order to succeed. MW3Blog for example didn't have all that much traffic until the months before MW3 was about to release to retailers worldwide. When I bought it, it was barely even picking up 5 visitors per day. Barely.

CODForums on the other hand suffered almost the same fate and it was on vB4 with vBSEO installed. However, when I transferred CODForums to xenForo, which is a product that Kier made. The site changed ranks.

I was expecting google to index the site slowly, but instead, the site started to grow, and then when I posted that Kick Mule Cola thread. The thread grabbed the keyword of the thread title ...Word for Word on the keyphrase "Mule Kick Perk-A-Cola" and then a few other variations of that keyphrase. Barely half a day, the site starts getting busy, and I'm asking myself "WTF! What did I do?" I post it to facebook and twitter that afternoon, the site starts to explode like a ticking time bomb.

Then MW3 came out, a few days later, the server went offline. Imagine that.

 

[Mike]

Frankly, I think we're sick of moderating this thread. It's not one person -- there are a bunch of people who are posting inappropriately here. Agree to disagree.