Does vBulletin need SEO mods?

[brandondrury]

I'm brand new to vBulletin and I was wondering if you guys thought that SEO mods are necessary. It seams like there are logical things you could do such mod_rewrite that could improve the search engines ability to spider the forum.

What do you guys think?

Brandon

[GuyFromChicago]

No, it really doesn't need any SEO mods to get indexed.

[SEbasic]

I (personally) think the SEO mods do more harm than good - All the ones I've used end up producing duplicate pages on different URLs - that's not good...

This is just MHO, but vB works well out of the box for most peoples needs.

[Voasi]

Using clean URLs will help your site get indexed. VB out-of-the-box doesn't have clean URLs. Further, you can't get keywords into the URLs with it outta box.

If you want to have a nice SEO forum using VB, try www.vbseo.com .

[GuyFromChicago]

Originally Posted by Voasi

Using clean URLs will help your site get indexed. VB out-of-the-box doesn't have clean URLs.

No it doesn't. There have been numerous thread on this same subject - "stock" vBulletin threads are indexed just fine.

DP (this forum) is a great example.

[digitalpoint]

Originally Posted by Voasi

Using clean URLs will help your site get indexed. VB out-of-the-box doesn't have clean URLs.

What do you mean clean URLs? You can't get much cleaner than the default URLs vBulletin uses.

[Voasi]

Originally Posted by digitalpoint

What do you mean clean URLs? You can't get much cleaner than the default URLs vBulletin uses.

This isn't a clean url: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=35458

But this is clean: http://www.vbseo.com/f28/automatical...ions-1601-new/

The second one has keywords in URL and no characters like ? and = . It's true, that VB outta box can get indexed and does fine for most, but I've found that having these clean type of URLs a) get the WHOLE forum indexed and b) provides better rankings

[GuyFromChicago]

Originally Posted by Voasi

but I've found that having these clean type of URLs a) get the WHOLE forum indexed and b) provides better rankings

I've found that it really makes no difference. I have vb forums with urls that aren't "clean" and they have no problems with indexing or placement in the serps.

Look at all the "clean" urls (including the blog entry on the same site) below my forum result (#1) for the term 2005 world series predictions.

There was good discussion about forum urls/indexing here too.

[SEbasic]

DP (this forum) is a great example.

Too right...

And I have forums that act the same way - In my honest opinion - vB with URL's like that, would look a lot more spammy...

Natural (IMO) is better.

[Voasi]

To each his own I guess. I've used these methods for some very large forums with great success. I've also helped others that weren't getting their 'un-clean' URLs become clean. But if the unclean URLs work for you, why ruin a good thing, huh?

[digitalpoint]

Originally Posted by Voasi

This isn't a clean url: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=35458

But this is clean: http://www.vbseo.com/f28/automatical...ions-1601-new/

The second one has keywords in URL and no characters like ? and = . It's true, that VB outta box can get indexed and does fine for most, but I've found that having these clean type of URLs a) get the WHOLE forum indexed and b) provides better rankings

Who set that definition of a "clean URL"? The 2nd URL looks less clean to me... contains an extra directory (forum) which isn't needed in the first URL, and ads a bunch of keywords and dashes to the URL.

I think "clean" is maybe just not the right term IMO.

[Blogmaster]

Originally Posted by GuyFromChicago

I've found that it really makes no difference. I have vb forums with urls that aren't "clean" and they have no problems with indexing or placement in the serps.

Look at all the "clean" urls (including the blog entry on the same site) below my forum result (#1) for the term 2005 world series predictions.

There was good discussion about forum urls/indexing here too.

It really doesn't make any difference at all. The days where simple url tagging impacted Google are gone. Whatever you can do to get your forum spidered best, is what you should stick with. vBulletin seems to have that area covered.

[flam]

Does anyone have a simple mod_rewrite for Vbulletin, planning to setup some forum someday and I strongly believe that no "?" is better.
Not that keywords have to be in URL's but simply having static URL's, does anybody have that for VB 3.5 ?

[Dekker]

Search engines aren't that archaic, they can read php files.

[emil2k]

I know you are talking about Vbulletin but since their is a discussion about clean urls, I can give you example I have just added a mod_rewrite to my forum, in sig, and the clean URLs are amazingly better and I like the indexing also, but i can actually see some rankings now with the clea urls I like it, but i have a question...Does anybody know why my sites indexed for the forum keeps fluctuating I mean that they are going up but then coming back down?

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:...GL:en&filter=0

Can someone advise me on where i should place "nofollow" tags on my forum to prevent duplicate caching...

Thanks

[admans]

I think VbSEO is nice mod for the vbulletin. Mine forum being new is already indexed by major engines...coz of the Seo hack with urls easy to index and having keywords list. Check out : RealWebTalk

[briandunning]

I suspect that "duplicate content" enters into this equation. If you have an unclean version and a clean version, and both work, and G sees both, you may get hit with a duplicate content penalty.

[digitalpoint]

Originally Posted by briandunning

I suspect that "duplicate content" enters into this equation. If you have an unclean version and a clean version, and both work, and G sees both, you may get hit with a duplicate content penalty.

Agreed... and normally it wouldn't be a problem since Google spiders so quickly, but if your old URLs are still available (and not giving a 404 to Google) it definitely could be a problem. The ideal solution of course is to 301 redirect your old URLs to the new. For example, the archive in this forum uses the ugly URLs with the thread title in them, but will also automatically redirect any request for an old URL (or one with the wrong title). For example this thread with the wrong title will be redirected:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/archi...e/t-35458.html

[briandunning]

But if you set up one RewriteRule to convert the incoming clean version into the ugly version so that PHP can process it, and you set up another RewriteRule to 301 the ugly version into the clean version, you will create a mobius loop which will fold the universe over into itself, causing the end of all things. I think Matt Cutts had a blog warning of this danger.

[digitalpoint]

I don't use any mod_rewrite rules for mine, but that's beside the point I guess.

Thankfully the people that developed browsers have averted a rogue webmaster from bringing about the end of the universe by limiting how many redirects will be followed with a single HTTP request.