Many times people get confused between what URLs are Search-Engine-Friendly(SEF) and what aren’t. The complex URL involving a lot of query strings etc.. appear mostly in user-generated-content scripts like Blogs and Forums. Take a look at the following URLs :

• Wordpress : http://www.yourwordpress.org/?p=176
• vBulletin : http://www.yourvbulletin.com/showthread.php?t=42918
• IPB : http://www.youripb.com/index.php?showtopic=236497
• SMF : http://www.yoursmf.com/index.php?topic=189291.0

Of course, these are very complex and looks pretty ugly. Further many of the URLs used in forums contain a lot of other query strings also like Session IDs, Post IDs in addition to Topic IDs etc… These kind of URLs are disliked by Search Engines. This gave rise to the SEF URLs.

With suitable plugins or settings, you can convert the above URLs as something like below :

• Wordpress : http://www.yourwordpress.org/p/176.html
• vBulletin : http://www.yourvbulletin.com/t42918.html
• IPB : http://www.youripb.com/topic/236497.html
• SMF : http://www.yoursmf.com/topic/189291.0.html

Thats it. These are better and are Search-Engine-Friendly URLs. But, are they easy to remember ? Would you be remembering Post IDs for the URLs. Of course, not. So, we need to modify these further to make them Human-Friendly as well.

So, you have to convert it into something like below :

• Wordpress: http://gotchance.com/2007/08/17/4-reasons-to-avoid-paid-reviews/
• vBulletin : http://www.yourvbulletin.com/your-topic-title/42918.html
• IPB : http://www.youripb.com/your-topic-title/236497.html
• SMF : http://www.yoursmf.com/your-topic-title/189291.0.html

Those are sexy and this kind of URLs are being used by most Blogs and Forums. Thats a very nice practice. Wordpress has it as an inbuilt feature. vBulletin has a plugin called vB SEO to do this. IPB has IPB Seo. SMF doesn’t have anything as advanced as vB SEO, but SEO 4 SMF pretty much serves the purpose.

If you don’t use any of these ready-made scripts, you can customize your URLs using .htaccess. We’ll see about it in the next post.

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