i'm trying to decide between mixed and advanced mod rewrite.

if i am not mistaken, this board uses mixed:

http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/phpbb-m ... t1190.html

phpbb-mod-rewrite is the subforum title. all discussions in that forum are mapped to -vtXXX.html

wouldn't letting user topics form the url as in advanced give the search engines more information even if bad keywords are used?

http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/phpbb-m ... t1075.html

Potentially thousands of posts are being mapped to one set of keywords.

With advanced, you have the keywords phpbb, seo, mod, rewrite, but also iis, install and help:

http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/phpbb-m ... t1075.html

Even if the topic is garbage sometimes, the same "phpbb, seo, mod, rewrite" is always provided so why isn't advanced mod rewrite always better than mixed?

Thanks.

And welcome

First, the mod rewrite used on phpBB SEO is experimental and is not like the one released.

They do not use any virtual folders.

The advanced will use :

cat-title-cxx.html, forum-title-fxx.html and topic-title-txx.html

The mixed one :

cat-title-cxx.html, forum-title-fxx.html and topicxx.html

The simple one :

catxx.html, forumxx.html and topicxx.html

As said in this thread, the advanced really is better if your topic titles are not of a poor quality, like "wah, this is really nice !!!!!".
So it depends on the average topic title quality in your forum.

phpBB SEO mod rewrite for phpBB2 are demonstrated here : http://phpbb2.phpbb-seo.net and there for the last advanced version -http://phpbbdev.phpbb-seo.net
For phpBB3 in advanced mode, it's here : http://phpbb3.phpbb-seo.net

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dcz,

thanks for your reply and your work on the mods. i had read the thread you posted and didn't understand why poor titles badly optimize in mod advanced.

"ha ha this is funny!" makes a poor title and hence doesn't optimize for any keywords

but neither does

"viewtopic.php?t=xx => topicxx.html"

"topic" surely does not optimize for anything, 100%.

mixed ~ topic = 100% bad optimization
advanced ~ dynamic topic = ?? < 100% bad optimization

so even 5% good optimization with advanced is better than 0% good with mixed.

is there something i am missing here? for instance, do search engines penalize a domain for having too much junk in the URLs?

-p

My thought is a general chat forum with a majority of poor quality topic titles could end up to be counter productive.
Keywords in urls do matter quite a lot, confusing keywords in url could in the end lead to confusion in SE too.

It's of course ok with few hundred topics, but with thousands ...
Useless SEO could lead to some kind of penalty IMHO. I think SEO is both a matter of particular and Global scope. And what could be the global scope to optimize too much on poor keywords and poor content ? Could lower the overall rank of the site if for example you, together with the forum run a nice CMS with structured content and nice keywords in urls.
Keeping the topic titles statically rewritten can help out to make the difference between a general discussion and a structured article on a domain for SEs.

I really think this can be an issue when it comes to big boards, where to many poor keywords in urls would lower the overall relevancy of urls.

And it's not something I tell for others to do, as you can see on this board, topics remains statically rewritten.

Then off course, if your topic titles are pretty good, and your topic decently focused, then, it can make a big difference.
But don't forget that many web sites do have really good results without it, not only the very old ones.
As always, SEO is a matter of choices and strategy. Injecting titles will mean more work moderating the topic titles, and only this can be a reason : ways and means

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