Question Discussion on DBSEO URL Format for Threads

[neounix]

Hi.

I noticed that DragonByte uses this thread format:

/f[forum_id]/[thread-title]-[thread_id]/

Do you mind to explain your thinking why you chose this over:

/[forum_name]/[thread-title]-[thread_id]/

Which would give even more keywords in the URL.

Or as we are thinking to do:

/[thread-title]-[thread_id]/[forum_name]/

Because we think that is is better to have more unique keyword in the URL "up front" and less unique keys in the back (like the forum name).

Do you have an SEO reason for your URL format, or it is something you just decided to do because you favor it without an SEO reason?

 

[Fillip H.]

There was no SEO reason IIRC, it was a format we landed upon with vBSEO and stuck with it ever since.

Omitting [forum_id] from the Forum URLs (and other formats where only [forum_name] remains as an identifier) is also bad for performance, as an extra regexp-enabled query is needed in order to reverse the forum name.
The same goes for omitting [thread_id] from formats where only [thread_title] remains as an identifier.

Additionally, it would conflict with our forum structure, since our product support sub-forums are all identically named. We would need to use the forum path functionality in order to distinguish forums.

 

[bzcomputers]

We personally run rewrites very similar to DBTech. It seems the f[forum_id] for forum categories was a standard used for many boards when the now defunct vbSEO came out.

I know personally we will be changing our url structure soon to incorporate more keywords. This is something we wouldn't have been able to do until DBSEO's recent implementation of url rewrite history. What would've been nearly impossible to do a month ago (at least without losing page rankings) is now as easy as it gets with DBSEO.

 

[neounix]

Thanks for explaining.

On our site, Google visits around 25% of all threads each day, so our site, from a thread perspective, is completely indexed every 3 to 4 days, max.

We agree that you need the [thread_id] in threads (showthread.php) and [forum_id] in forums (forumdisplay.php) and [post_id] for showpost.php.

We made the mistake with VBSEO to only use [forum_name] for forumdisplay so we had to add a mod_rewrite rule for each forum when VBSEO died; so we learned our lesson to always include the numeric id as above.

We also noticed that sometimes the end of longer URLs get truncated; so we plan to use this format, in general, for threads:

/[thread_title]-[thread_id]/[forum_name]/

for forums, we plan to use:

/[forum-name]-[forum_id]/

and for stand alone posts:

[thread_title]-[post_id]/[forum_name]/post[post_count].html

We are going to use a "minimal list" of stop words, since many of the stop words in the list are actually search keywords for our forums (like find, a unix/linux command, etc)

We don't care about members URL, avatar URLs, etc; but we do care about tags.

That just about sums it up for our current thinking.

Overall, so far, we like DBSEO better than VBSEO because DBSEO focuses on the core "SEO things" we like; where VBSEO was too "feature bloated" and overly complex.

Furthermore, we think DragonByte's support and attitude toward helping their customers is much superior to VBSEO, so we are very pleased to support the DB team.

Thanks and keep up the good work!

PS: we are considering changing the words "post" and "index" in DBSEO URLs to a forum-specific keyword.

 

[Fillip H.]

Thanks for the kind words, both of you

I'm actually super pleased with how the beta period has worked out - pretty much as soon as cruisin was done reporting issues with the most commonly used features, neounix came in and used a different feature set (on vB3, no less, for double test-y goodness) and started finding issues with those.

You both have been super helpful with your reports as well as site access, DBSEO wouldn't be half as stable as it is today if it wasn't for you guys
This is especially true considering the nature of the mod - it becomes about eleventy bajillion times harder to debug certain issues if I have to re-create the circumstances from someone's site on my own forum, vs. just being able to go in and debug it right there.

Keep being awesome

 

[neounix]

Hmmm.. After some research into this, I think it might be better to use the same VBSEO format for DBSEO URLs

There seems to be a possible SEO hit for all the 301 redirects.

For example, we 301 our old VBSEO URLs to the original forum URLs. This means all our existing links (on other sites) will be 301'ed back to the original links.

Then if we create a different URL structure with DBSEO, those links will be 301'ed again.

So, I"m now thinking it might be better for established sites to simply set up DBSEO links the same as they had for VBSEO to keep the existing links to the site the same format and to avoid 301 redirects.

Is that what others think is the best strategy?