(2012-02-09, 07:17 PM)Monaco Wrote: [ -> ]I'm considering dropping google SEO from my forum because It adds so many queries.
Are you using the latest version (1.6.x)? The number of queries for URL was reduced (compared to 1.1.x/1.4.x). The only case where URL uses a considerable amount of queries is when other plugins produce a lot of extra links, and for this case Google SEO 1.6.x offers the URL "lazy mode" which works differently (builds the SEO URLs at the very end of the page generation process), using only a single query (followed by string replacements).
(2012-02-09, 07:17 PM)Monaco Wrote: [ -> ]I've read that it's a myth that search engines cannot properly place or crawl your site if you have standard URLs,
Google doesn't have any problem crawling dynamic URLs.
(2012-02-09, 07:17 PM)Monaco Wrote: [ -> ]even that google would rather have you keep your default URLs.
No, that's a common misunderstanding of
this blog post. What they are saying there is "if you are going to make horrible rewrites, we'd rather you make no rewrites at all".
This Google SEO plugin is based on
Google's SEO Starter Guide. On page 8 and 9 of this guide they say very specifically that using words in URLs is a good thing and a best practice, that (quote) "if your URL contains relevant words, this provides users and search engines with more information about the page than an ID or oddly named parameter would", whereas users might have a hard time with IDs in URLs. And hence that's what the Google SEO plugin does; remove the IDs, put in words.
On rewrites specifically they say (quote of page 8 in Google's SEO Starter Guide)
Quote:Google is good at crawling all types of URL structures, even if they're quite complex, but spending the time to make your URLs as simple as possible for both users and search engines can help. Some webmasters try to achieve this by rewriting their dynamic URLs to static ones; while Google is fine with this, we'd like to note that this is an advanced procedure and if done incorrectly, could cause crawling issues with your site.
And that's exactly what the other blog post is about, rewrites that are done incorrectly. You shouldn't do those. Google SEO doesn't do those. With Google SEO there are no crawling issues and no duplicate content issues because it replaces each single, unique ID with a single, unique name, and it also employs proper redirects and canonicals. Google is fine with this, at least when I go into my Webmaster Tools I don't see any issues and according to my sitemap statistics I have almost 100% of my relevant content indexed by Google.
Of course I could NOT be using SEO URLs and still have 100% indexed, who knows? Using words in URLs is merely a recommendation by Google, as is proper page titles, meta description, or having a sitemap for search engines. These things are not obligatory, and SEO as a whole is entirely optional - search engines are greedy beasts, they will crawl your site either way - it's merely nice to have, nice to have words in URLs, nice to see what an URL is about before you actually click on it, etc.
If you want to stop using Google SEO URLs, you're free to do so; the plugin does not force you to keep using its URLs, the ability to redirect Google SEO URLs back to the original MyBB URLs was part of the functionality from the very beginning, see the documentation (basically all you have to do is revert the changes to inc/functions.php and Google SEO Redirect will redirect everything back to showthread.php?tid=123 or thread-123.html depending on your SEF setting). So going back is not a problem with minimal impact using 301 redirects (again as recommended by Google's SEO Starter Guide).