Why sitepoint has no friendly URL in forums ?

[loeches]

Hi there,

Maybe I´m wrong in the concept of friendly URLs in PHP and thta is why O´m asking this. If i´m wrong please correct me but why this site has no friendly URLs in forums? A thread URL goes like this for example:

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=192980

Is this friendly? And why it is not wanted friendly?

best regards to all

[bluedreamer]

Search engine have no problems indexing URL's with query strings like that so they are "search engine friendly". If you use any search engine you'll find many Sitepoint forum posts, quiet often they get listed within minutes of being ceated.

In days gone by search engines had problems indexing URL's with very long query strings but even they don't seem to be as problematic as they used to be.

[loeches]

Hi, thanks for your input. So basically there is no more need to make a Rewrite Cond, etc for making this URLs "friendly" because search engines are better today and already like these URLs?

[felgall]

The only time you need "friendly" URLs is if you expect to need to be able to tell them to real people and have those people actually type the URL into their address bar. People can easily make mistakes if the URL they have tp type is a random string of characters but search engines have no problem these days with the URL being anything. Since it is extremely unlikely that anyone would actually need to tell someone else the address of a particular forum post rather than just emailing them the address (which they can then either click on or copy/paste into the address bar) a "friendly" URL is unnecessary.

[dvduval]

I suspect there can be some small additional benefits to having keywords in URLs but I too agree that it is something that was more important in the past than now.

[ScallioXTX]

If you're looking to buy a printer and the first two search results are:

http://www.example.com/show?p=2817281872&a=218278138

and

http://www.example2.com/shop/printers

Which one would you pick?

For simplicity I've left the <title>'s and descriptions of the pages out of the equation, just assume they're equally bad.

[spVince]

Search engine have no problems indexing URL's.

True, but still would have SEO benefits as it is a known factor for SERP's

Since it is extremely unlikely that anyone would actually need to tell someone else the address of a particular forum post rather than just emailing them the address (which they can then either click on or copy/paste into the address bar) a "friendly" URL is unnecessary.

Even when emailing, many users find it more 'comforting' to see a 'human friendly URL'

I suspect the real reason for SitePoint not to implement human friendly URL's is due to the slightly higher server load.
It's already quite slow to access this forum from UK as it is.

- Vincent

[cranial-bore]

There is some SEO benefit to having keywords associated with the document (the URL). You'll notice all the Sitepoint blog posts do. It's not that search engines can't cope with a numeric ID, but that they use the URL as one indicator of the content.

For things like forum threads though, there are hundreds of thousands of them, and many discuss similar things. They are the long tail and I'd say show up in SERPs for pretty specific queries (e.g php gzip compression memory use rather than a search for php tutorials), so there's not much loss to having only the thread ID in the URL.