Originally Posted by Apoc
Things not to suggest:
1. Changing forum titles. (See the explanation of Google below)
A quick explanation on how Google (and other sites) index websites:
Google (GoogleBot, bots, spiders) periodically crawls websites to index content. (The stuff you see when you search Google, is the direct result of crawling web pages for their content, and URLs) As all of you can see, MMOwned and FPSOwned use something called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It's blatantly apparent from the URLs you see while browsing both sites. This turns 'garbled' URL names, into easily read (by humans, and bots) URLs. (For example, mmowned.com/forums/suggestions/ is actually something like mmowned.com/forums/index.php?f=152. Big difference don't you think?)
Google (being the largest search engine on the internet), penalizes websites that have multiple content, and a lot of 404s. (Unreachable pages) So, if we were to change the Suggestions section, to Site Suggestions, the URL would be, forums/site-suggestions/ instead of forums/suggestions/, which would not only cause 404 errors (gracefully handled by vBulletin in the form of the wonderful 'Page not found' page), but also multiple content in the eyes of Google, and other search engine spiders. This not only penalizes MMOwned and FPSOwned with multiple content, but also changes the old indexed pages, into those lovely page not found pages, which not only lowers site traffic, but also lowers whats called Page Rank. (Page Rank is just how Google ranks certain pages on certain topics and content)
So, in short, changing URLs to different pages, or creating multiple pages on the same content (a result of the previous) will hurt MMOwned and FPSOwned more than you think.