and nobody is able to prove, why our mod_rewrite URLs are less important than if they contain text.

How about having the title within the URL makes it FAR better for SEO rather than numbers, which beare no relevant context for the topic.

I understand why there is a need for only a numerical version, however depending on how you code it, it's possible to allow for non-English characters.

makes it FAR better for SEO rather than numbers
could you prove it? quote google or some another search engine?

I have a custom written script that uses topic title as the url instead of numbers. I also use another site with just "regular" mod-rewriting provided by minibb. I'm a SEO and frankly do not see a difference why a "regular" mod-rewriting would be worse than the one using titles in google or yahoo.

As Team said, people use different languages and characters and making it all work would require messing up the core code.

The ONLY advanage of "title-mod-rewriting" MAY be that people who search on a search engine can see the keywords related to their search in the green (in google's case) url. BUT - at the same time google does not highlight these keywords in the url - it only highlights the keyword in the domain or in a directory -- so it most likely means google does not give a credit to the page just because it uses this keyword in the domain.com/keyword.html url.

makes it FAR better for SEO rather than numbers
could you prove it? quote google or some another search engine?

In URL it's not important, if you talk only about only URLs in adress bar, BUT it is VERY IMPORTANT if you consider links.

For exemple, link www.site.com/21212_21212.html is not considered same way by SEs as the link www.site.com/some-relevant-text-here.html as it contain keywords.

Google says :

"Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links."

source :
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

So yes, having titles in URLs is important.

And using regular expression you can convert titles.

For exemple "I don't care" => "i-don-t-care" or "i-dont-care"

or "Déjà Vu" => deja-vue

and so on.

You are interpreting Google guidelines completely wrong. Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links - try to use text instead of images are the key words here. By that it means, your important content on the site must be placed as plain text, not as image. This is a basic rule for beginners who like to keep font styling and some kind of visuals, but forget about plain text content indexed by SE.

If you locate mentioned Guidelines for "links", you won't find "keyword" links mentioned somewhere. "Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links", "Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site", "Check for broken links and correct HTML", "Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)" etc., but nothing about what you say and what is discussed in that topic.

If you think a bit, you will find this schema logical. Keywords in links are meaning NOTHING for SE, just because if they would, then everybody building a site, could make internal links keyword riched, and every site would have the same ranking as other. What's the sense?

I recommend you - relax your brain and forget about this thing. If you locate miniBB.com forums in Google, you will see all pages are indexed great, despite our URLs are not keyword riched.

There are much bigger number of problems appearing, if you decide to convert URLs from page titles, you can't even imagine, how stupid, ungrammatical can be users creating new topic subjects, and what is appearing on the output finally. We have very strong politics about that and we have no plans to change it.

Hello Paul,

I was talking about SEs, and they care about href tags, and plain text in links, i'm not talking about miniBB. I have my own independant rewrite rule which works with everything (I will adapt miniBB to work with) so I really don't care if miniBB core implement or not titles in URLs as it will never be the way I want it to be.

Your forum is great, light and clear and I really love it. Still missing some features to be really competitive but it is already nice.

Keep doing good job.

Thank you for kind words!

So, I still would like to see an official acception from any SE, that they give higher rankings to the sites with keyword URLs. I am more than sure this is not true and SEO fake. I have a lot of sites even with dynamic URLs, and they are all indexed well and ranked well despite of that.

So, I still would like to see an official acception from any SE

Unfortunately, SE companies will never tell us how their bots works, and its normal they don't want people to cheat :)

Yes, but SE companies still recommend to build sites correctly, and publish advices on that. As you see, keyword URLs are nowhere mentioned, so this advice is out of correct site building, and looks really like a SEO fake amongst many other fakes. So you can use ANY type of URLs, the most important thing is that they should be placed on text links, not flash or images or some other elements, that's all... as a coder, I find this is very logical.

I dont know if this adds anything to this discussion..

but on one of my blog pages all of the main text content is about stock trading...

but the url has many keywords in it and one of the keywords is "summer doldrums"

so I looked at the page and the adsense ads that were displayed and two of the ads were about summer camps for kids !

so this tells me that google does use the keyword urls as a means of displaying its adsense ads... but it probably does not affect SEO rank..

trc4949
Does your page contain the same keywords in the META TAG Keywords section? Or probably they are somewhere mentioned in the content itself?

I have another example - on some site, I have all pages without keyword rich URLs at all. They all are scripts with .php extension, and contains 2-3 dymanic parameters inside. Despite of this, if Adsense meets some keywords in the content, it begins to display thematical ads. In general, this site has pagerank 5, but not a lot of visitors per day at all (maybe 300-400 unique hits). I think, that proves that keyword riched URLs means nothing in the point of SEO, as it should be. It's a fake.

so I looked at the page and the adsense ads that were displayed and two of the ads were about summer camps for kids !
Adsense is money machine for Google - they will try to monetarize each and every word or part of the word they can find (in alt text, url) ;).

ok i'll try

BUT - at the same time google does not highlight these keywords in the url - it only highlights the keyword in the domain or in a directory

Hmmm, well check this out...

If you do a google search for 'Polish Singles'

the 3rd listing down brings up this url:

http://www.polishforums.com/Polish_Singles_and_More_f9_0.html

and the keywords polish singles are highlighted....

it appears this forum is using MINIBB !

and they have implemented mod rewrite to make the keywords of post titles appear in the URL.

I do not think that this site that uses MiniBB would have come up 3rd in google search for term 'polish singles' had they not implemented keywords within the URL like they did...

Also I note that this site has removed the MiniBB link credit at the bottom of their forum? I thought that was not allowed.

tom