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.
what do you think is better ?
vBulletin : http://www.yourvbulletin.com/t42918.html
OR
IPB : http://www.youripb.com/topic/236497.html
I can see how they’re SE friendly, but what makes those URLs human friendly?
You still have to remember the topic IDs. :S
And for Wordpress, wouldn’t the best URL be to replace the date sections with the post’s category? That’s human and SE friendly. :)
Yeah, placing dates in the URLS are the best. Thats what i concluded with. And, the forum URLs, they are not too human friendly. But they are atleast better than the previous ones.
Fair enough. I agree that the forum ones are definitely nicer. :)
This is how I prefer blogs to be:
http://www.yourwordpress.org/your-post-title – and then /comments or /newcomment on the end of it.
@aRo – Both are pretty much the same.