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SEO: Rewriting ~/discussions to Top-Level

phreakphreak Vanilla*APP (White Label) & Vanilla*Skins Shop MVP
edited December 2014 in General Banter

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

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    x00x00 MVP
    edited December 2014

    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.

    grep is your friend.

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    BleistivtBleistivt Moderator

    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.

    My themes: pure | minusbaseline - My plugins: CSSedit | HTMLedit | InfiniteScroll | BirthdayModule | [all] - PM me about customizations

    VanillaSkins.com - Plugins, Themes and Graphics for Vanillaforums OS

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    phreakphreak Vanilla*APP (White Label) & Vanilla*Skins Shop MVP

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

    • VanillaAPP | iOS & Android App for Vanilla - White label app for Vanilla Forums OS
    • VanillaSkins | Plugins, Themes, Graphics and Custom Development for Vanilla
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