SEO: Rewriting ~/discussions to Top-Level

phreak

Hi all,

I have been thinking bout that for almost 2 years now. I use the discussion list as the main view of a forum with about 125.000 visitors a month. Right now the top-level-domain www.myforum.com as well as www.myforum.com/discussions is showing this main view. There is no difference in both except the URL.

SEO-wise there have been toughts expressed for probably more than 10 years that you'd better not run 2 URLs for the same content, also Google Analytics wise, it would make more sense to have them combined.

I'd like to have your thoughts and ideas on rewriting www.myforum.com/discussions to www.myforum.com. It might be a cleaner solution and also search engines will acknowledge this.

It's very important that my forum doesn't get a downranking because of a move like this (because of advertising, market position and so on), so i am asking for your opinion on this.

Thanx for your 2-cents,
phreak

x00

I bet you have something like <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.myforum.com/" /> in the source of

http://www.myforum.com/discussions in which case there is no need to do this.

Vanilla team wouldn't overlook something like this, there is too much as stake for them personally.

Bleistivt

Like @‌x00 said that shouldn't be a problem, as Vanilla uses canonical URLs throughout the whole application.

All major search engines support them (Google for about 5 years now).

Vanilla does much more than that, though, e.g. the profile/discussions and profile/comments pages are set to noindex entirely as they feature duplicate content.

phreak

OK, thank you for the information. It's true i haven't looked into to search for a canonical. Problem solved! Thanx.