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…
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 ?
That is the default configuration of bbpress, you cannot omit the /topic/ as it will always coming back and besides that points to a discussion or specific topic of the page. According to my friend from seo gold coast Australia, it is part of the systematic method for bbpress to have that one.
no support by developers cause it’s made the wordpress way
no negative effect for SEO of the original url structure
I.e.: website.com/forum/tech/technical-question…
instead of website.com/forum/topic/technical-question…
It has no negative effect but it would grant two more positive ones.
(1) More freedom for the user in terms of customizability and (2) the new customizability grants free space for keywords in the URL which are not only nice to read for search engines
What about the htaccess rewrite ideas, I didn’t get any of these working and many say it’s not recommendable.
Sure but try to rewrite it in your own words. Dublicate Content is deadly for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and senseless for the internet as a public database of information.
To complement your knowledge:
4 or 5 years ago there was a working plugin for the standalone-version. But bbPress now is on the one hand a Plugin for WordPress and on the other hand it has gone through some serious changes (Updates/Improvements).
I’m not sure if there’s still a standalone version managed and maintained by the developers. But in the past there were working methods to customize the URL structure individually (Mostly “core-hacking”).