Question Regarding URLs

Hi,

This isn't really a problem as such, but I notice there isn't a General vBSEO Plugin Discussion forum so I figured this would be the next bet place.

Anyway, I have a question that has been playing on my mind for a while: At the moment I have my rewrite rules set to rewrite my forum URLs to [forum_title]/ (which is the default) but I tend to change my forum titles very often.

For instance, one week my main news forum might be called "News" and the next "Announcements" or something along those lines, which of course means the URLs will look different, example:

http://site.com/news/thread.html
http://site.com/announcements/thread.html

Does this mean I might be penalized by Google for having duplicate content? Would it be better for me to just use the [forum_id] tag instead so I don't have to worry about the titles of my forums changing?

Sorry if this has been posted before but I did a quick search and came up with nothing. Hope you can help me out. Cheers.

Steve

If you change the forum title, and don't have the ID in your URL format, all old URLs will be invalid.

If you plan to change a lot, then you should use something like the format used here on vbSEO.com.

Hi ConqSoft,

Thanks for pointing that out, I have now rewrittin my URLs to display only the forum id, similar to the system used here.

I just have one more query: I notice that by default the member profiles in the vBSEO Admin interface are set to /members/name.html but here the member profile pages are rewritten to folders, such as /members/name/

Are there any benfits to using it with the default .html extension? Just curious.

Steve

I personally prefer using .html extentions, as in essense thats what the URL a singular page which doesnt contain any subfolders etc ... also i think for me at least .html pages look visually more attractive.