I was just wondering with all things considered, be it boards with mods hacks and all the bells and whistles, even basic setup, which type of bulletin board set up performs the best on the search engines.
vBulletin... IMO. Try this - do a search on google for your topic and add 'forums' to your topic - and see what kind of forums come up. For example. AUTOMOTIVE FORUMS or MUSIC FORUMS
I'd say that phpBB is the worst and vBulletin/IPB are tied for the best. I don't think that's a good method at all, joey...just because you get more results does not mean that it is the best SEO'ed...Of any one particular forum software, vBulletin is the most widely used for large forums, and THAT is why you will see more results, not necessarily because it has better SEO
I disagree VB is the best simply because it's more widely used than phpbb. Of course more serps show VB simply for that reason alone not becuase it has some magical SEO powers. I have a thread about mybb and how excellent it's performing for me after only a couple weeks. http://www.mybboard.org if you want to check it out. It's free and has some excellent features similar to VB. I do think that for SEO phpbb has too many weaknesses in that area and requires modification for better performance.
phpbb2 is by far the most exploited insecure piece of junk ever made..... esp if you use default registration stuff. There is so many programs around to epxloit phpbb2 flaws
http://www.moddedmustangs.com/forums/ As SEO friendly as they come. VBSEO can't touch this. Just a little ole phpBB forum... Keyword url's ( http://www.moddedmustangs.com/forums/rear-seat-delete-vt1543.html ) google sitemap ( http://www.moddedmustangs.com/forums/sitemap.php ) h1 & h2 tags images get alt and title attributes with thread titles, forum categories, etc. dynamic keywords and page description nofollow's on all non-content pages related posts template caching sql caching etc etc 10k pages indexed, virtually all are cached. Extremely fast loading, low server load, etc. People can balk at phpBB all you want, but ultimately in the end... he who dies with the most se referrals wins right? SE traffic doubling every month for the last 3 months since the seo was done.
yet still highly exploitable just wait until your forum starts ranking for phpBB as people scrape the search engine results for forums to exploit.
I personally run a phpBB forum at the moment and my forums have been destroyed by many a bored teenager. I think they have been ruined three times in total so I'm keen to upgrade to proper bulletin board software before it happens again, but I have a few concerns about their SEO - thus this thread. I have certainly done what I can to improve my forum's rank in the SE's with phpBB and it gets like 2500 visitors a day and I'm wondering if I changed over would that destroy my SEO to date?
That all depends on what SEO your referring to. If you mean OnPage optimizatino, then yes, it'll be gone since your pages will be changing to a different f software. If your referring to offpage, then no, it should be just fine.
My site is about a game called Runescape - www.rsboards.com - what do you think the effect will be if I change?
I'm interested in this too. I really like the SEO features of the Vanille Forum because of the mod_rewrite structure it uses, but it's 'too' simple for me. I need something that has a little bit more to it than all that Vanilla currently offers. Anyone know of any other good boards that use default SEO mod_rewrite functionalities and have great general SEO features?
I can say one thing - phpbb is worst when it comes to being indexed by Google. I have it on one of my sites and now I am going to try using a SEO hack. Let's see how that works.
I ended up using MyBB and I might convert it over to vBulletin later on. I think that vBulletin has the best SEO right now -- using a free vRewrite hack provided on vbulletin.org -- it's a REALLY good alternative to vBSEO.
Sorry if these issues have been brought up before, but I didn't see anything that similar when I posted it. Anyway I have recently bought a new forum and it is currently using Invision, now I know that the general agreement is VB and IPB out of the box are the most SEO, but I just wanted to know is IPB out of the box better than a phpBB forum that has had the SEO hack installed on it? Sounds like a weird question but the only forums I have ever used have generally been VB or phpBB and I'm not enjoying IPB at the moment yet I don't want ot invest too much into the forum until I know it has potential and can be successful if you know what I mean - any recommendations?
Can i recommened impbb. Its a great new Bulletin Board Forum Software that has just launched. Its light, efficient, and doesn't cost a penny.