Search Engine Friendly links are enabled on WKey Forums

[SensoVision]

I've just wish to let you know that in addition to Google sitemap which I've installed some time ago. I finally take descision to try enable search engine friendly links on WKey forums. I've did it after study indexing of Senior's Play Ground Forums which had PR 2 on the mainpage(before I've put 301 redirect from the old address) and have pretty good amount of pages indexed in Google.
So from now instead of links like this:
http://forum.weblamp.net/index.php?topic=4740
you'll see something like this:
http://forum.weblamp.net/index.php/topic,4740.0.html
which hopefully help to ranking to be better spreaded around the site and result in better indexing of site overall.

As you can see both type of links still work so there should be no problem with accessing topics which was bookmarked or have links from other sites.

[Andy]

It would be interesting to know if you find it results in more visitors via the search engines.

I didn't notice any problem with speed accessing pages since the change. I read somewhere that it may slow down navigation as the server executes the mod re-write code. If anyone notices any problems, I hope they post their experience.

[SensoVision]

It would be interesting to know if you find it results in more visitors via the search engines.

I'll post results when I see any difference.

I didn't notice any problem with speed accessing pages since the change. I read somewhere that it may slow down navigation as the server executes the mod re-write code. If anyone notices any problems, I hope they post their experience.

maybe it's happen only on the big servers... I also hope that if anyone spot some slow downs after this switch they would let us know about it here.

[SensoVision]

just spot that we have boards indexed in a new way:
site:http://forum.weblamp.net/index.php/
so it takes us around 6 days to start new way of links to get into the Google.

[Andy]

It seems like the phrase ":-) Our community" gets you top results   

[SensoVision]

yeah, I thought to try and market our community like this, since one of our main aims is to be friendly place, so guess smile wouldn't harm

[SensoVision]

It would be interesting to know if you find it results in more visitors via the search engines.

Andy, just thought you would be interested in this thread: http://forum.weblamp.net/index.php/topic,4178.0.html it's not actually about using search engine friendly links but about combination of them and sitemaps. But I thought that maybe you and possibly someone else would be interested in reading it.
As for boosting traffic we have one thousand more of unique visitors this month(for proff check Alexa statistic for our site) than previously as for search engines first time for a long time we've got more visitors from Yahoo than Google(which was second and bring about 100 visitors less this time ) but both search engines bring more visitors including all other engines like AltaVista and AllTheWeb which use Yahoo's database. The only engine which send less traffic in January was MSN.

[SensoVision]

it's not a full month yet but while I remind about it, decide to post current statistic:
here is top search engines:
Dec 2005:
- Google  791
- Yahoo     665
- MSN      138
- AltaVista   25

Jan 2006:
- Yahoo   1101
- Google 1035
- AltaVista 46
- MSN   16 (probably it's caused by changing all links, seems like MSN didn't like it at first or there was another reason for this)

26 Feb 2006:
- Yahoo   1497
- Google 950
- MSN 163 (as you can see traffic from MSN is back to normal and even raise a bit and it's still not the end of the month)
- AltaVista 50

Andy, what do you think about this all, would you plan to change your SMF scripts to search engine friendly type of links or not yet?

UPDATE:
Here is final results.
28 Feb 2006:
- Yahoo   1711
- Google 1038
- MSN   194
- AltaVista 53

[SensoVision]

Just wish to post data for March:
- Google   3757   3773
- Yahoo   1805   1886
- MSN   158   191
- AltaVista   67   67
- Unknown search engines   65   65

BTW spiders seems to crawl us more as well, here is the data:
January 2006:
Inktomi Slurp   18339+1637   
Googlebot   19690+73   
MSNBot   3436+310

February 2006:
Googlebot   85591+61   
Inktomi Slurp   24901+1958   
MSNBot   12117+515

March 2006:
Googlebot   215064+63   
Inktomi Slurp   64095+3057   
MSNBot   20102+701

[Andy]

I'm not convinced that the simple change to the URLs makes a big difference.

I am now doing some experiments searching on Google:

1. search for simple guide css

webmaster key is #9 in results.

The title tag is obviously the most important factor by the highlighting.

The other results are from forums with better looking urls.

Web lamp's urls look terrible:
forum.weblamp.net/index.php/topic,5320.msg28547.html?PHPSESSID=cca2230bd263d37a0853a778caea7ec6

2. search for simple css "another way of applying a style sheets to a web page"

Now weblamp is #5 out of 73 pages containing this duplicate content.

p.s. here is a site discussion SEO for the SMF forum script: http://www.smfseo.org

These session id's should be masked if possible IMHO. Maybe it's because guests can post and SE robots are guests?

[SensoVision]

I'm not convinced that the simple change to the URLs makes a big difference.
I am now doing some experiments searching on Google:
1. search for simple guide css
webmaster key is #9 in results.
The title tag is obviously the most important factor by the highlighting.
The other results are from forums with better looking urls.
Web lamp's urls look terrible:
forum.weblamp.net/index.php/topic,5320.msg28547.html?PHPSESSID=cca2230bd263d37a0853a778caea7ec6

Yes, unfortunately SMF seems treat spiders as guests with disabled cookie support and gives them session kind of URLs...
I think that it's possible that we had not so good listing because of this.

2. search for simple css "another way of applying a style sheets to a web page"

Now weblamp is #5 out of 73 pages containing this duplicate content.

p.s. here is a site discussion SEO for the SMF forum script: http://www.smfseo.org

didn't have time to check it deeply yet, have it ready solution for converting forum to kind of URLs they are using? And have you tried it yourself?

These session id's should be masked if possible IMHO. Maybe it's because guests can post and SE robots are guests?

exactly

But believe or not our listing is really improved either because of search engine friendly links or maybe Google Map mod, as right now if you search on Google site:forum.weblamp.net there would be about 63200 results... and I should say that we never had so much pages listed before. Also each month traffic from Google is constantly growing as well.