Hi and thanks for reading! I have a phpBB2 forum running on my website and I'm going to upgrade it to the phpBB3 version. The forum's url is not good so I was thinking maybe I'll change it. The new url is going to be as descriptive as possible in the language that it's used in the whole site. So - when it comes to SEO, what does it mean? I would of course redirect everything permanently (301) to the new url via an .httaccess file. Would this kind of a change have any kind of an effect in terms of SEO? Thanks!
Are you ranking for anything significant? If so, keep the existing URL. Having keywords in a URL is far from the most important thing on earth.
Well, it can help a lot with long tail keyword phrases; as long as you properly 301 redirect all your URLs you won't have any permanent damage to your search positions. However, you may see some temporary fluctuation.
personally i find keyword urls/domains very important I did a site recently for a friend he had a 3keyword domain and ranked on page 1 for that 3 word phrase in a week It has 86,400,000 results for it However that works fine IF your domain is made up solely of the keywords I dont think buys greatestsecondcarsinnewyorkstate.com would rank well for "cars"