Optimal Structure for Forum Thread URL
-
For getting forum threads ranked, which is best and why?
- site.com**/topic/**thread-title-goes-here
- site.com**/t/**thread-title-goes-here
- site.com**/**thread-title-goes-here
I'd take comfort in knowing that SEOmoz uses the middle version, except that "q" is more meaningful to a human than "t". The last option seems like the best bet overall, except that users could potentially steal urls that I may want to use in the future.
My old structure was site.com/forum/topic/TOPIC_ID-thread-title-goes-here so obviously any of those would be a vast improvement, but I might as well make the best choice now so I only have to change once.
-
I suggest using that. Would give you better rankings for that topic and then some juice can go to your threads.
-
It's a forum I built myself. I could easily make the "topic" the name of a category instead, I had just never thought of that approach.
-
Haha, Yes it does.
I'm not sure what you are using but vBulletin had that option. Having topic as the category would be better, but if its not doable the 3rd would be best.
That is strange Topic is Topic though. What platform are you using?
-
Sorry, I should have added that the word "topic" is the actual word that's being used. It's not a placeholder for the name of a topic. So it has no keyword value.
Does that change your answer?
-
I would go with first one, more keywords for search engine to identify. I think majority would say the same, it is just more friendly for search engines.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Changing URLs
As of right now we are using yahoo small business, when creating a product you have to declare an id, when we created the site we were not aware that you will not be able to change the id but also the ID is being used as the URL. we have a couple thousand products in which we will need to update the URLs. What would the best way to be to fix this without losing much juice from our current pages. Also I was thinking that if we did them all in a couple weeks it would hurt us a lot, and the best course of action would be to do a slow roll out of the URL changes. Any help is appreciated. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | TITOJAX0 -
Best URL-structure for ecommerce store?
What structure will recommend to the product pages? Lets make an example with the keyword "Luxim FZ200" With category in url:
Technical SEO | | gojesper
www.myelectronicshop.com/digital-cameras/luxim-FZ200.html With /product prefix:
www.myelectronicshop.com/product/luxim-FZ200.html Without category in url:
www.myelectronicshop.com/luxim-FZ200.html I have read in a blog post that Paddy Moogan recommend /lluxim-FZ200.html - i think i prefer this version too. But I can see that many of the bigger ecommerce stores are using a /product prefix before the product name. What is the reason for this? and what is best practice?0 -
301 on certain url string
I have a few thousand old urls with the string /content/ in them and are looking for a way to 301 batch redirect them. So for all the urls that contain the word 'content' I would like to redirect to 1 specific page. I have tried the methods below without success. Regular 301's are working fine but this particular method is not working for me. I am running a Joomla site but I don't imagine that would have any impact. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Redirect 301 ^content/.*$ http://www.mysite.com Redirect 301 ^content/ http://www.mysite.com
Technical SEO | | omega0 -
Www or not www base url
Here is the situation. Developer custom coded a magento commerce shop for a seo client and is having problems adding www to the URL without breaking the site. They wont be able to get this completed until a couple months down the road. We are starting monthly SEO this June. Most directories and websites link to the www version of a site not the non www. What should I expect since we are ranking for the non-www and linking to the www version. In web master tools i'm telling google to display the URL as www.
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
Backslash in URL
my main URL is www.americanmusical.com, SEOMOZ shows I have a duplicate page title on www.americanmusical.com/. I have the think the backslash is causing other issues. I noticed when I first go to my site it is without the /, but if I navigate to the home page, the URL has the / in it. Any ideas on if this is a problem or how to handle it?
Technical SEO | | dianeb1520 -
/$1 URL Showing Up
Whenever I crawl my site with any kind of bot or a sitemap generator over my site. it comes up with /$1 version of my URLs. For example: It gives me hdiconference.com & hdiconference.com/$1 and hdiconference.com/purchases & hdiconference.com/purchases/$1 Then I get warnings saying that it's duplicate content. Here's the problem: I can't find these /$1 URLs anywhere. Even when I type them in, I get a 404 error. I don't know what they are, where they came from, and I can't find them when I scour my code. So, I'm trying to figure out where the crawlers are picking this up. Where are these things? If sitemap generators and other site crawlers are seeing them, I have to assume that Googlebot is seeing them as well. Any help? My developers are at a loss as well.
Technical SEO | | HDI0 -
We changed the URL structure 10 weeks ago and Google hasn't indexed it yet...
We recently modified the whole URL structure on our website, which resulted in huge amount of 404 pages changing them to nice human readable urls. We did this in the middle of March - about 10 weeks ago... We used to have around 5000 404 pages in the beginning, but this number is decreasing slowly. (We have around 3000 now). On some parts of the website we have also set up a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new ones, to avoid showing a 404 page thus making the “indexing transmission”, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. We've lost a significant amount of traffic, because of the URL changes, as Google removed the old URLs, but hasn’t indexed our new URLs yet. Is there anything else we can do to get our website indexed with the new URL structure quicker? It might also be useful to know that we are a page rank 4 and have over 30,000 unique users a month so I am sure Google often comes to the site quite often and pages we have made since then that only have the new url structure are indexed within hours sometimes they appear in search the next day!
Technical SEO | | jack860 -
URL Length
What is the ideal length for an item's URL. Theirs a few different options. A) www.mydomain.com/item-name B) www.mydomain.com/category-name/product-name C) www.mydomain.com/category-name/sub-category-name/product-name Please choose A, B, or C and explain why you made that decision. Looking forward to the responses.
Technical SEO | | Romancing0