Hello,

I am setting up a forum for a new site im setting up and i would like it if instead of a dynamic link, each post had a static url. I know that most shopping carts now have add-ons that let you use mod_rewrite to create static url but i cant find anything for forums.

I found an addon for PHPBB that adds an archive to your site with SE friendly URL's but it displays content from locked discussions and isnt ideal.

Does anyone know the best way for me to go about doing this?

Thanks

You can get a guide to creating static url's for PHPbb from Able2Know.com

http://www.able2know.com/forums/about15132.html

This is a link to one of their forums, so you can see how the static URL would look.

Don't worry overly about the latest fad of "search engine friendly" URLs, provided the "unfriendly" ones don't go over 3 parameters or use session IDs.

I have a site on test half set up to use URLs with parameters (upto 2) and the other with static looking URLs (established site just new content)

I'll leave you to work which ones have been crawled first by Google, MSN and Yahoo.

yeah, i think the big search engines are getting better at indexing now but i find that having keywords in page names can shift you up a few places in the rankings somtimes.

I'm not sure your test is fair if one site is newer than the other but its a good idea to test the theory but difficult to put into practise as you cannot put 2 duplicate pages on the same keyword (not strictly true but it can be difficult and results are unpredictable).

Anyone got any ideas on how to test is a dynamic url and a static link with keyword rank different? I guess the most obvious way is to take a website check its rank then change it from dynamic url's to static and monitor change but im not sure i have any site that would be suitable for the test.

Actually the test is on the same site so age, backlinks etc can be ignored. The pages are from different product categories and the "friendly" ones appear first in the navigation. So while it may not be a 100% scientific test, it's a real world test.

I'll be changing over the dynamic URIs over to static looking later on (6 weeks or so) so we'll see what happens.

cool, keep us posted

I was searching to find if 'bot friendly urls' are a myth and dug up this old thread.

Was there any outcome when you changed form dynamic to static?

Thanks

I don't know how Chirs's test turned out, but I think seo friendly urls can gave some benefit. I would think the benefit would be about the same as having a keyword rich domain. It shouldn't be the most important factor in rankings, but it probably has some kind of positive effect.

To bring this up to date;

The only measurable difference seen is the crawl speed from bots when a deep crawl is in progress. With parameter URIs there would be a delay of 3 to 5 mins between each page request. Now the delay between requests is only a few seconds.
So "SE Friendly" URLs are not server friendly, just be aware of this if you are on a shared or heavily loaded server.

I don't know any thing about forum software. but i learnt lot of things from this post. Thanks for every one who contributed to thi post.

keyword in url does help..