Why don't LQ rewrite urls to enhance search engine rankings?
 

I was just thinking, if LQ applied mod_rewrite to the thread links, they would probably get a far better ranking from search engines whose spiders don't like appended queries... for example,

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=437654

could be rewritten as

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/thread/437654

I have done this on a few site which I hae worked on and the pagerank has increased dramatically. The result for LQ would be a higher ranking on google, more traffic to the LQ forums and more revenues from their adsense insertions.

Apoloties if this has been discussed before.. I was just looking around and it seemed like an easy kill.


christo

I have moved this thread over to Website Suggestions and Feedback. We are usually number one on Google when you search for a Linux problem , how much higher do we need to go?

Heheh that's a fair comment and it's true you do have very good rankings, but the turn around on indexing will increase dramatically. You'll find that threads are indexed within 3-4 days if you SEO in that way, rather than several weeks without that added help. I think that for the very small amount of time it would take to implement, it's something of a no brainer and it could help your business significantly. Your page impressions will increase significantly and your adsense earnings will go up proportionally and applying the mod is a very simple thing to do.

Not sure what suddenly prompted me to start going on about SEO stuff. I'm not generally a commercially-minded beast :)


christo

Heh. Funny comment about LQ being a business (see the .org? :) )

I don't think this needs to be done- the current system works well. Let jeremy etc devote time to other more worthy projects- like his life! :) (you thought I was going to spruik my most-wanted feature of the moment, didn't you!)

titanium_geek

Thanks for the suggestion. While we may move to something like that is the future, it would be based on the fact that the URLs would be more convenient for humans. The major search engines have not minded query strings for years and page rank is based on the number of inbound links you have (in addition to the page rank of those inbound links... coupled with a couple other factors), so it would not be impacted by the layout of the URL. What it can impact is keyword density and therefore ranking, but as Ray already pointed out - we seem to do OK with the current setup.

--jeremy

I think I like static urls, personally, because it also is technically better for browsing the web, since the pages are uniquely identifiable and not just using the showthread.php?t=239040 or so on. When the query part is stripped it is virtually impossible to identify referring URLs for instance.

I also like the static pages idea. It's not really a difficult thing to implement, but it can be beneficials.

something that I've noticed is, on a slower connection, I'd like to jump straight to a forum, say general. I'd like to be able to just type in: lq.org/general instead of the numbers that it is at the moment.

titanium_geek

What? You mean you don't have an entire "Bookmarks" section mirroring the forum/site setup at LQ? :D