Duplicate Content and vBulletin Forums

Duplicate Content and vBulletin Forums

I recently wrote the article Duplicate Content and vBulletin Forums, and have just updated it as well.

Long story short, the article discusses how Google handles duplicate content, especially as it applies to vBulletin forums. The article demonstrates that a normal vBulletin forum can not only have the archive pages and the main thread pages indexed, but also without any discernable penalty.

The article discusses why this is and why duplicate content is not an issue within a forum, why the Printable version of the thread along with the archive can all be indexed simultanously.

 

There most prominent reason not to index all possible versions of a thread has to do with controlling how visitors find your site:

- The "show post" version is horrible for someone to find as an SE listing; it normally has no links at all to the rest of the site.

- If you use only the Archive version, and force people to find your site that way in the SEs, you're able to show a lot more ads to the often 1-time visitors and spare your normal guests and users the bother.

- If you don't pay attention to the Archive and expect people to find you through the main thread listings, you're losing a lot of opportunity because the default vB archive does very little to encourage click through to the rest of the site... so if you do leave all versions up, be sure to give the archive some attention first.

 

The flaw in your theory is that your assuming that Google will index your main forum threads. The point of the article is that there appears to be no duplicate content penalty.

The better answer is to slightly doctor your archive. Put a 468x60 banner, and the statement that says something like: This is our Archive. Please visit our Main site by clicking here.

Thats called directing the visitor.

 

>>The flaw in your theory is that your assuming that Google will index your main forum threads.

I've seen you say before that there is no need for vBSEO because Google indexes the main threads just fine. I agree.. as long as it has a way to navigate back in time or has been indexing the forum in the same way since it went up.

>>The point of the article is that there appears to be no duplicate content penalty.

And I agree with that as well.

>>The better answer is to slightly doctor your archive. Put a 468x60 banner, and the statement that says something like: This is our Archive. Please visit our Main site by clicking here. Thats called directing the visitor.

Yes, that is what I said-- give your archive some attention before relying on it to guide the visitors to the rest of the site.

-- Hoff (original author of vBSpiderFriend, which the Jelsoft vB archive is based on)

 

Well, what I meant by this is that Google doesnt always index every thread, in fact that's rare.

 

Good point; I hadn't seen the page size related to Google's storage concerns and their reasons to index a page before.

Also consider (via recent Cutt's blog comments) that a site's PR influences the number of pages that will be indexed. Of course we've known this for many many years, but now it has official confirmation. So assuming you have more pages than PR, having dupe versions of a page reduces the chances of having all of the original content indexed.

 

My thinking is slightly different.

My thinking is that higher pagerank means google is willing to let your site occupy more total space in the index, so the higher sized pages (the main thread pages) can now be stored in higher proportion. I dont think its necessarily just about the number of pages but the size of those pages. This is why I dont like the heavily graphic custom vBulletin skins.