SEO "friendly" URLs

[f2k83]

First: Do URLs have much, if any impact on SEO these days or have the big search engines more or less moved on to content only?

Second: If the case that SEO friendly URLs does help, would a sub-directory of a friendly URL structure have impact on the indexing?

I did a quick mod rewrite that takes forum topics and outputs them something like this: TLD.com/category/topicid/topic-title-here/pg#

I did it this way because it was simple to tack on the topic's title in URLs on the board. .the rewrite basically just ignores it and uses the topic ID regardless of what is entered after it. It seemed like a quick and optimized solution (the topic IDs are indexed in the db but the titles aren't).

What effects, if any, will this have on search engine performance?

I won't lie, I haven't really paid much mind to SEO before. Google likes to change things so why bother is what I felt.

 

[enlytend]

Might make a minor difference, but there are sooooo many factors taken into account for rankings. You'll only know when you try it, but I'd say most likely it will be like a drop of water in the ocean.

It's more important that your site is easily crawlable and that you don't have canonical issues that would create duplicate content.

If you have a forum, I'd be more concerned about spammers. Google has been punishing sites for spammy UGC (user generated content) lately.

I haven't really paid much mind to SEO before. Google likes to change things so why bother is what I felt.

Rule of thumb: Just stick to the kind of things they like. (And if you're gonna do something they don't like, make sure it isn't blatantly obvious .)

 

[f2k83]

I know SPAM can be a nightmare. I help with one board that gets at least 30 a day. Another board we only get a few every few months. Besides different software, the latter I block major spammy countries (US focused board anyway).

Now about those conical issues: Does Google consider slash and no forward slash to be two different pages? I know some do. While I'm doing URL rewrites, it shouldn't' be hard to get rid of this issue.. maybe time consuming. I'll just have to check and recheck every url that isn't being set by a var. For most, links are being built with just a couple variables so most are already in check. It will be just a matter of ensuring the rewrite code and static links do the same thing.

Edit: Found this> http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394 Which should help. I thought it would be good to add to this to thread in the event someone else has the same questions that I have.

 

[enlytend]

You should still do the rewrites if you can, but rel=canonical is a big help when rewrites are not doable or practical.

Blocking certain countries eliminates the majority of the nuisance traffic - sad but true.

 

[carla2013]

As far as I remember, last year Google announced that he will no longer encourage URLs that contain keywords. However, friendly URLs are still useful, in my opinion, anyway.