How SEO friendly URLs impact on visits?

[frostschutz]

This user has been denied support.

The idea of SEO friendly URLs is that there are keywords right in the URL. I'm not sure I agree with this approach, as keywords should be in titles, etc.

Google will also crawl random generic URL names, so sure, everything works without these. But still Google explicitely recommends to "Use words in URLs". URLs with words that are relevant to your site's content and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site..

So, why not use "thread/site-suggestions" instead of "thread/432" or "Thread-How-SEO-friendly-URLs-impact-on-visits" instead of "thread-224109.html".

Also, your site is named "aspergers.network/forums" after all, if the URL doesn't matter, why not go for "0193415.xyz/7420303" instead?

You might laugh but the forum I originally developed Google SEO for started out as something like "26743.freeforumhost.com/topic=100583528705" before moving to MyBB.

Yeah, ... that was awful.

[Løque]

Thank you for the plugin

[s3_gunzel]

Also, your site is named "aspergers.network/forums" after all, if the URL doesn't matter, why not go for "0193415.xyz/7420303" instead?

If you go further, you'll note that we're aspergers.network/forums/topic/3199 (it's a 404, don't bother going there) - we don't actually put anything into the URL to the degree that would be considered useful by SEO.

I picked up the .network domain three years after I made the website - we were asperger.net.au before that!

[makpaolo]

The idea of SEO friendly URLs is that there are keywords right in the URL. I'm not sure I agree with this approach, as keywords should be in titles, etc.

Google will also crawl random generic URL names, so sure, everything works without these. But still Google explicitely recommends to "Use words in URLs". URLs with words that are relevant to your site's content and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site..

So, why not use "thread/site-suggestions" instead of "thread/432" or "Thread-How-SEO-friendly-URLs-impact-on-visits" instead of "thread-224109.html".

Also, your site is named "aspergers.network/forums" after all, if the URL doesn't matter, why not go for "0193415.xyz/7420303" instead?

You might laugh but the forum I originally developed Google SEO for started out as something like "26743.freeforumhost.com/topic=100583528705" before moving to MyBB.

Yeah, ... that was awful.

Even though it isn't available by default for MyBB or as an option/setting, at least Mybb has a plugin for it, and it will help out definitely, but it's not like your website wouldn't rank if you were to use the default showthread URLs

I have Google SEO on my forum and dont plan to remove it, but even if I were to deactivate, there would not be a huge seo affect, its just for the little "extra" boost

Also, having keywords in ur URL can help your website with ranking, but again, none of these are needed to rank as Google will still read posts/threads/sections/etc for keywords to rank your website, especially for a forum

[samkhan]

Google recommends that the URL structure of a website should be as simple as possible. SEO friendly URL can be implemented by the simple way like domain name - main category - subcategory - page name. In this format do not use any special characters or numbers.