HELP- Major IPS URL / Google Indexing issue!!!?

[CSSlife]

So I recently just converted my community over from Xenforo to IPS. So naturally there were going to be a ton of redirects from the old URLs to the new URLS. And all that works fine.

Initially for the first week or two I had the forums application set as the default - so thread URLS were https://mywebsite.com/topic/15-example-topic-name/ 

I then decided to change the default index application to the 'Our Picks' page (for displaying news) and I thought everything was fine until I started getting messages from Google Webmaster Tools saying there was an 'Index Coverage Issue' with over 1000 errors and that this could impact my search rankings! so I looked into it and shortly found out IPS had re-written all the URLS from ".com/topic/15-example-topic-name/" to ".com/forums/topic/15-example-topic-name/"
 

 
 

With Xenforo, topic/thread URL's were ALWAYS static regardless of any changes to the index application. For example on XF the url would stay "example.com/threads/example-thread.1/"
 

Is this issue on IPS by design, or am I missing something? I don't want to kill my search rankings every time I decide to change the index application, I don't want all my thread/page urls changing causing havoc with Googles crawlers and indexing.

What would you recommend, is there something I can do to prevent this? 

edited, sorry when adding one of the images it ended up replacing a paragraph of text above the image. I've retyped up the text, it should make more sense now.

[CSSlife]

weird, the thread acting strange. Double posted. Anyhow, the first post is fixed.

[Rhett]

This is normal and expected, the only time it will change the urls is if you set forums as the default app, setting any other app or any other page as the default will always retain forums at /forums though.

It's best to set it as you like it, and let it reindex, google is a freak, they expect nothing to every change though, so they alert you on everything. 

[opentype]

Yes, that is by design. You have one default app and every other gets an URL slug (forums/blog/gallery …) to avoid conflicts and confusion. 

If you need to change the default app and URLs get rewritten, you just need to make sure that there are proper redirects. Nothing wrong with moving parts of your site or your entire site. 

[CSSlife]

6 minutes ago, Rhett said:

This is normal and expected, the only time it will change the urls is if you set forums as the default app, setting any other app or any other page as the default will always retain forums at /forums though.

It's best to set it as you like it, and let it reindex, google is a freak, they expect nothing to every change though, so they alert you on everything. 

I became aware of this after looking into why some threads weren't indexing and ranking as highly as the usually do, whether it's related or not that's up for debate I guess. But is there a way I can set the forums to be /forums/ even if I decide to change the forums back to the default app?

I'd much prefer to keep the URL structure the same as much as possible. For piece of mind if anything.

[opentype]

You can adjust the URL structure in the “Advanced Configuration” in the ACP. But as the title says: it’s an “expert feature”. I wouldn’t recommend to mess with it until you absolutely have to. And your case isn’t such a case in my opinion. ;-)