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?

[@sadr Participant 13 years, 1 month 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…

[@spabav Member 13 years, 1 month 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 ?

[@hseatsleeper Participant 13 years, 1 month ago]

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

Did Matt tell you this directly?

[@spabav Member 13 years, 1 month 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.

[@ebenue Member 13 years, 1 month ago]

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

[@ethanandrew Participant 11 years, 5 months ago]

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.

[@drrr Participant 10 years, 11 months ago]

Instead of creating a new topic I’d like my question to be answered in here.

I downloaded and installed the bbPress-Plugin for WordPress and set it up for my website. Here’s the link to my forum.

I changed the permalinks /forums/forum/ to /forum/kategorie/ (engl. category)

Does anyone by this time know a guide (for non-coders) or plugin to customize the permalink structure in bbPress?

I’d like to change the structure from: (Origin)

forums -> forum(folder)/topic(folder) -> forum/topic

To: (Personalized / SEO Optimized(imho))

forums -> forum -> topic

I did some research beforehanded:

• 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.

[@drrr Participant 10 years, 11 months ago]

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”).

[@deepikal Participant 8 years, 10 months ago]

You can use Permalink settings and customize your URL. Here, you can create your own URL structure as per your keyword, which helps in SEO