I run VB (just like this forum) What is the best way to SEO it? There are many things talked about that I cant do -- like changing Page Title and descriptions for every page, (or any page). The forums are also naturally graphically intensive...... which makes more troubles.........
You really don't have to do anything if you don't want. The only thing I did was monkey around with the titles a little for some templates.
Joey, perhaps you could create a vBulletin version of How do I optimize phpBB for search engines? Craven seems to have explored every possible path.
How about Googling for "Search Engine Optimize vbulletin" to find the Time2Dine VBulletin thread for "Search Engine Optimize vbulletin". In fact, you have already found me, but I thought I would put this here to help others.
Got a bit more thinking to do though - I'm no longer top for "Search Engine Optimize VBulletin" Because: I now have 5 pages for the thread and Google picks the latest page (link from homepage) as its best page, and page 5 is not as well optimized for the phrase as page one, and has no external links - page one has lots of external links. and the first page is rather large - 100k+ so I get ranked lower than I would otherwise. Rather interesting how it all works.
I use phpBB, and I have an entry page as the top most page of my domain index.html it redirects users to my homepage and redirects search bots to a dynamic on-the-fly created "sitemap" of my msg board, uses high keyword density and each post on my msg board is turned into a link. I just recently got google to index my page, and yahoo has 5k pages indexed I bet you could pull that off with vbulletin too pretty easy keep you from having to totally hack your msg board
I dont know much about any of this so, just learning, but I'd imagine it would be easier to do similar tricks for PHPBB and VBulletin if you knew a wee bit about PHP. I'm just going through how to optomise my board for Google and likes. The link that T2DMan suggested is a great resource which people should look at. Thanks for posting that.
"Cloaking" in such an extreme fashion as you suggest is not that good an idea. I want the front page of my forum to be found for its search phrase, not some site map. The sort of cloaking I dont mind the idea of is to say reduce the number of links that the search engines see - ie hide the "show post", "reply to" etc links. To totally change the page content is rather against Google guidelines, and usability. The VBulletin forum has such a dynamically created site map/archive/library, however, in its standard form the site map shows yet another version of the thread. My hacks change the site map so that the site map links directly through to the actual thread. Then, rather than doing the cloaking that you suggest, I have each site map as max 100 links, and have a footer link on each page, to each of those 100 link site maps. In this way, I get the max Google PR through to each site map and through to each thread. My site maps are now PR4-5. I have hundreds of threads that are number one on Google for the first two/three words in their title, without having to resort to such an extreme as the cloaking that you suggest.
On my new site: http://forum.downsizer.net/ I have optimised phpbb with all the suggestions in the above Able2Know link, plus a few more tweaks for good measure. So far we are only getting about 10 search engine hits a day, but for an 8 week old forum, this strikes me as quite good? jema
I recently optimized my phpbb forum using the able2know optimizer. So far, there's not much to tell. I don't know that Google has visited again to crawl all the post pages, but I just checked MSN and it has already done so (at least some of them). Optimizing my pages was one of the best things I could have done, I think.
Be patient. That Abel2Know MOD will most definitely pay off in due course if you have any decent content at all (you do need that, of course - something besides the titles for the spiders to digest).
I think it involves spamming your forum signature all over DP by replying to five year old threads. That must be the best way to do SEO work, because it's so popular.