CMS url's question

Hey all,

New to VBSEO as ive mentioned before, this is my latest project: Car Forums

Now i am just after some advice in regards to the article urls, i am noticing that vbseo is putting a unique number in front of each article, is this good or bad for SEO factors ?

Example url:

Code:

http://carsforumz.com/content/2-honda-cr-z.html

I would rather the URL look like this:

Code:

http://carsforumz.com/honda-cr-z.html

Is this possible ? if so how so ? and would this have better serp juice ?

Sorry for all the questions, it's just i am new to vbseo and would rather get it right from the start than have to make changes later on.

Regards, Darren

Hi Darren,

When it comes to removing the /content/ folder this is possible but only if you have an identifier on the other url types for example you can't have your articles being in the forum [article_id]-[article_title].html and have the forum thread in format [thread_id]-[thread_title].html as vBSEO would have no way of determining the two apart.

So basically if you move your articles to root by removing the /content/ folder your going to have to add a /forums/ folder or something similar to all of your forum re-writes.

Regarding having the ID in the title, there is no documented effects of this on SEO but I think even if it does have an effect it will be minor. The benefits of having the ID are much more evident however.

1) It fixes possible clashes between two articles with the same title.
2) If someone mis-types the URL as long as the ID is still in place it will redirect to the correct URL
3) If you change the article title, without the ID the old link would become 404, with vBSEO you get redirected to the new URL with the new title.

I am sure there are other benefits too but I can't think of them at the moment, but as you can see (or atleast in my eyes) these benefits massively out weight any potential negatives.

Ceri

Thanks very much for taking the time to explain that for me, i will leave it as is then. was just a little worried with the unique number at the start of the article title, but i guess Google has evolved a lot in recent years and should be able to work that out, so yeah i wont touch anything.

The support around here is Second to None !! Cheers guys

Regards, Darren

It is a pleasure to support customers like you Darren. Google has indeed advanced past the point where that would be considered bad and in fact in the case of google's news feed it is required that the URL's have a UID (Unique ID) in them to qualify.

It would be a bad thing if you were only assessing the ID number so if for example I could go to

Code:

http://carsforumz.com/2-not-the-real-url.html

and it would still load the page

Code:

http://carsforumz.com/2-honda-cr-z.html

without any corrective redirect or giving of a 404 error then this would be bad, and I have seen google testing for this before.

vBSEO doesn't allow that if you go to a page with the wrong title in the URL it 301 redirects to the correct URL. Some other SEO software/rewrites don't make this check and so do allow this to happen and that would be bad.

Ceri