After a standard installation of the bbPress 2 plugin, I am getting this kind of URL for my forum posts:

http://mywebsite.com/forums/topic/this-is-the-name-of-the-forum-post

For SEO purposes I would like to shorten the URL to this:

http://mywebsite.com/forums/this-is-the-name-of-the-forum-post

I tried to the content of the field “Topic slug” , but it keeps on returning, whenever I save the settings.

How can I shorten the URL structure of all posts?

[Erlend Sogge HeggenParticipant @sadr 1 year, 7 months ago]

For what it’s worth, removing “topic” should have no effect on SEO.

If you have a “General” forum, i.e. at /forums/general , wouldn’t you rather avoid the confusion if a user starts a thread called “general”? I actually don’t know what would happen in this scenario…

[spabavMember @spabav 1 year, 7 months ago]

Erlend,

Thanks for your comment.

Yes, It does have an effect to be one category deeper (at least according to Matt Cutts from Google).

So, yes please, I want to generate the URL’s without any additional sub-category… and Yes, I would not mind if i had something like ../forums/general generated.

Would be great if you could tell me how to take this extra subdirectory layer off in bbpress ?

[Hard Seat SleeperParticipant @hseatsleeper 1 year, 7 months ago]

The shorter URL might look better to you, but according to Google it has no difference in search rankings:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_A1iRY6XTM

Did Matt tell you this directly?

[spabavMember @spabav 1 year, 7 months ago]

Thanks Hard Seat Sleeper for updating me.

I really glad that I dont need to worry anymore about those extra sub slugs.

Thanks for clarifying.

[EbenueMember @ebenue 1 year, 7 months ago]

Can it be modified using htaccess? I still want more shorten url.