• Registered: 2007-01-02
  • Posts: 4

Topic: search engine friendly urls?

forgive me if this has already been mentioned, im new to this otherwise excellent software.

but it is apparent to me (as an seo professional) that punbb could really be improved by search engine optimized urls.

for example:

http://punbb.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=44507

replaced with:

http://punbb.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p … f-the-post

can punbb be modified in this way? are there any plans afoot to do this?

I know a lot of forums dont do this but urls written in this way make a big difference to Google which takes account of (and regards as significant) the title of urls in assessing the merit of a page's content.

  • From: -8 GMT
  • Registered: 2004-05-04
  • Posts: 1,396

Re: search engine friendly urls?

the soon to be v1.3 will have better urls than current ones.

~James
FluxBB - Less is more
  • Registered: 2006-04-30
  • Posts: 382

Re: search engine friendly urls?

marc234 wrote:

forgive me if this has already been mentioned, im new to this otherwise excellent software.

but it is apparent to me (as an seo professional) that punbb could really be improved by search engine optimized urls.

for example:

http://punbb.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=44507

replaced with:

http://punbb.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p … f-the-post

can punbb be modified in this way? are there any plans afoot to do this?

I know a lot of forums dont do this but urls written in this way make a big difference to Google which takes account of (and regards as significant) the title of urls in assessing the merit of a page's content.

yes it can, check out my module called punmap in the modules section.

  • Registered: 2006-06-05
  • Posts: 410

Re: search engine friendly urls?

This has been mentioned multiple times for both past and future versions of PunBB.

Future: http://dev.punbb.org/

Past:
http://www.punres.org/files.php?pid=139
http://punbb.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=8579
http://punbb.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=7340

  • Registered: 2007-01-02
  • Posts: 4

Re: search engine friendly urls?

thanks for that guardian34

i noticed that it is proposed to create "fancy urls" with mod_rewrite.

I don't think the developers would need to go that far, last year google announced that it doesn't have a problem indexing urls with a query string in them. In fact i dont think google ever did. all i would like to see is that the pages are referenced by their title in the url not by the id of that record in the db.

im convinced that:

?post=your-page-title

is just as good as

punbb/post/your-page-title/

here's a relevent blog post: http://blog.tripledogs.com/?p=76

in my view mod_rewrite brings unnecessary complications like file referencing and server issues which would probably require significant revisions to the application code.

6 Reply by guardian34 (edited by guardian34 2007-01-03 21:31)

  • Registered: 2006-06-05
  • Posts: 410

Re: search engine friendly urls?

http://punbb.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=4571

Edit: You can't rely on just a title/subject, as they are not unique and are subject to change.

Edit: Ok, I'm confused by your link?

Tom Myer wrote:

Before I go, I gotta quote one more source:

Chris Beasley wrote:

?
So, you don?t need to use search engine-friendly URLs [16] to be listed in Google. However, these URLs do have other benefits, such as hiding what server side technology you use (so that you may change it seamlessly later), and they are more people-friendly. Additionally, while Google can spider dynamic pages, it may limit the amount of dynamic pages it spiders from one particular site. Your best bet for a good ranking is to use search-engine friendly URLs.

This is from Chris Beasley, writing for Sitepoint. Is SitePoint the publisher of my book? Of course. Does that make this information any less true? Of course not. Please note that Chris seems to advocate the ?safer is better? approach, in that a search engine friendly URL might get more of your pages spidered.

So, is it okay to use dynamically generated content with query strings in the URL. Sure. Just avoid the id= keyword and inserting session variables. If you?re feeling paranoid, then use Apache?s mod_rewrite to change your dynamic URLs into something more human readable (ie, from /innerpage.php?pageid=7&category=SEO to /topics/seo/page/7), or use a friendly URL module like the one we wrote for TopDog.

Emphasis added.

Speaking of hiding server side technology: http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI


Edit:

Dr.Jeckyl wrote:

the soon to be v1.3 will have better urls than current ones.

By the way, these will be optional. smile