Help needed to evaluate the best SEO URLs combination

Hey there guys, I’d like to ask you some clarification on SEO URLs. Right now I have this SEO URLs in my vBulletin forum, for forums (sections):

/community/tele-forum/f.104/

Where tele-forum is the name of the forum and f.104 is the forum ID. And this should be okay in term of SEO, if I’m not wrong.
Then for discussions I have the following structure:

/community/tele-forum/south-park/t.2748/

Where tele-forum is the forum name, south-park is the discussion title and t.2748 is the discussion ID.
Right now I have the forum name included in the URL. What do you think? Maybe would be best for me to have just this:

/community/south-park/t.2748/

… without the forum name in the URL?
Thanks in advance for any reply! :smile:

Is this advice from Google of any help?

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Thank you, TechnoBear. Sure, there are a lot of useful info, but not exactly what I was asking for: if, in my case, would be better to remove the forum name from the discussion’s URL or not.

I really don’t know. The URL now is “long”, but does Google check the keywords in the URL even if they are at the end? And most imporant, does it give to them more importance if they are at the start of the URL or not?

I doubt if the order of the keywords matters much to Google.

But you need to remember that it’s the content of the page which will have the most bearing on whether or not Google returns it in search results; the URL will only play a very small part in that, if at all. On the other hand, it might make a difference to somebody reading those results; it might help them decide whether or not to click through. If the forum name will help them decide how relevant the results are, then leave it in. If you don’t think it’s particularly useful, then take it out. (FWIW, the category - e.g. Marketing - isn’t included in SitePoint forum URLs.)

Yes, I see. Here you have the URLs divided in “threads” (“t”) and “categories” (“c”).
Well, my forum URLs are surely relevant. If the name of the discussion is “Funny Kid” and the forum URL is “videos and images” you know that the discussion is relevant to a video or an image. My doubt is this:


(forum)


(discussion)

As you can see the website structure is already included in the search results. The real URL is not shown…

Does that answer your original question? Google knows the structure already?

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Yes, sure, but that’s due to the schema.org tags. I mean, if is there a better solution to improve SEO I would go for it, and that’s why I’m asking. :smiley:

After I switched from site.com/community/discussion-name.html to site.com/community/forum-name/discussion-name/ it seems that I lost a lot in SERPs. I’ll probably go back, at least removing the forum name in the URL…

When you alter your url structure in some way, you can expect a dip in serps, but it should be temporary while the new urls get indexed. Unless you got it really wrong, it should recover over time.
And be sure to make redirects from the old urls, resubmit the new sitemap and maybe “Fetch as Google” to request a prompt re-crawl.

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Thank you agaian for your reply, SamA74. Umh, I was just thinking at this: today every big website seems to just leave the URLs as short as possible… whithout the category (forum, in my case). So, you see always these type of URLs:

and so on. So probably in my case would be best to shorten the URLs as possible. I really don’t know. I could wait to see if they get indexed well as they were… but I’m afraid to lose visits in the meantime. What do you think?

Oh, EDIT: I already redirected the old URLs and resubmitted the sitemap.

I’m not sure exactly how big an impact on seo the url structure has, but Google says it prefers shorter, simpler, readable urls.

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Okay, I’ll definitely go back using short URLs. :smile:
Thanks!

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