how to change the URL structure?

PolishForum_pl

Currently the structure is like this:

Domain/"discussions"/ThreadNumber/ThreadTitle

Can I have something like this instead:

Domain/ThreadTitle,ThreadNumber

or

Domain/ThreadTitle/ThreadNumber

or at least drop the "discussions" part?

x00

discussions is a controller, it needs to know which controller to send it to.

If you do it you have to do complex routing to resolve that from other things, not for the faint hearted.

Even if you did this your links would not reflect this, you would have to redefine those.

PolishForum_pl

Is that on a TODO list perhaps?
Because it's quite important for SEO, among others.

peregrine

maybe this will help.

http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/comment/162397/#Comment_162397

x00

Actually there is no SEO advantage to getting rid of the 'discussions', it is purely preference.

I think you actually mean 'discussion' rather than 'discussions' as they are different controllers.

There might be negligible gain to translating it, however a lot of SEO tips are total BS. The real SEO is in the slug bit.

SEO need to be focused around content if you want to get anywhere.Technology favours RESTful interfaces.

Google are also not stupid it understand the structure of the url, usually reads left to right and there is a good chance that what is on the end is more specific.

So they are not going to penalise it, becuase they know they can't make assumptions anyway, and also given that these once denoted physical folders, then that would be pretty silly.

Don't confuse that with duplication, which is different, and happens on a page.

Google's focus is on making the content more relevant, so they don't penalise arbitrarily. If anything they want to put SEO tipsters out of a job, as increasingly the old ideas are becoming redundant, as their algorithms are honed more on content an less on superficial thing.

I wouldn't hold out for this happening any time soon. It may happen to some degree, but is not a priority.

Wordress is different becuase it is basically all post, pages are also posts, and you can put the loop on a page, if it is not your home.

PolishForum_pl

Yes, you are right, I'm talking about "discussion" not "discussions".

I do know about the importance of quality content. Who said I can't have both quality content and short, friendly URLs?

This particular "tip" comes from Google itself - I remember seeing a video of Google employee explaining that they give more weight to a site when the relevant keywords are more "left" in the URL - each subsequent URL segment is less important.

PolishForum_pl

And that approach makes perfect sense.
When searching for "real estate", a quality site at "realestate.com" is supposed to rank higher than a quality site at "chicago.com/realestate/".

aery

@PolishForum_pl said:
Yes, you are right, I'm talking about "discussion" not "discussions".
This particular "tip" comes from Google itself - I remember seeing a video of Google employee explaining that they give more weight to a site when the relevant keywords are more "left" in the URL - each subsequent URL segment is less important.

I remember that video

x00

Do you have this video?

I would think it is relative to page, rather than the site rank. In that is deems a page more relevant relative to another.

Also there are well capable of taking to account that other pages have this structure, if you were just inserting noise words into the url that would make some sense. I also think it would have to be very far to the right not to be considered at all.

In general google does not discuss factor involved in that search algorithm, as it does not want people abuse it.

What you say is problematic, becuase if goes against common framework structure used in MVC.

/application/controller/method/params

Which leads me to think if they have such a policy, they would make it almost negligible or they will have to abandon it eventually.

it is fair to say, people don't like urls that that they can't read.

Google wants to follow what is actually relevant rather than what seems to be relevant, it algorithm almost certainly uses data training, rather than fixed weighting. In fact I know that is the case, but I'm fairly confident it is the case with this example.

The way data training works is by taking a starting point, and then over time taking the result an plugin them back into the equation. So if it turn out, this isn't a significant factor in relevance then the weighting will go down.

What actually affect SEO, is usability. If you site is less easy to use or confusing, then the lack of interest will be reflected in you search rank, this will be far greater than any minor factor.

This is good idea of have some SEO factors play off one another, and you have decide have far you want to go one way or another.

There is another problem I can think of in terms of SEO, if google cannot distinguish non-forum pages, becuase the these are on the same level, then this can be an issue with regard to consistency. Yes of course it it doesn't distinguish how we do, but there are difference algorithms. If a site is consider poorly structure, this might be a bigger negative, as people don't like poorly structured sites.

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You might however create some landing pages for some for you discussions. These need to be done carefully, and selectively. To satisfy users.

Anonymoose

For reasons of localization alone, these should not be in English only. Especially when the domain is not English, having the word "discussion" hanging out there as part of the URL looks rather amatureish.

x00

Like I said this development will happen eventually, but wordress was amateurish for a number of years, there are a lot priories to sort out.

Those that have the expertise can do it, it is is just a bit more complex than people think, and it also relies on people using the core functions which they don't always do.

jorisw

I would advise that you read up on using mod_rewrite to silently rewrite the URLs from the structure you want, to the structure in Vanilla.