Google not touching Vbulletin

I broke down and bought vbulletin about 2 weeks ago from suggestions of its seo ability from you guys. Its setup for seo right now (title changes, rss feeds, archive, and sitemap). As far as link building goes I've pointed about 9,000 coop weight at it, 100+ directory links, and few bought heavy relative pr links (pr4 and pr5). On my past sites usally I do all this and the influx of google starts coming quickly. It been about 2 weeks now and google has touched the site 61 times compared to yahoo at 1681 and msn at 888. To make things even more interested google has indexed my homepage where as yahoo has indexed 1,000 pages. Usally I experience the exact opposite? Any ideas? The only thing I can think of is that google doesn't like waiting for the php rss feed to load (gives me much more relavent adsense ads) but the other bots don't seem to mind.

The site is in my sign.

 

Keep adding posts - especially to those empty sections.

Google will warm to it, just keep building the content.

 

First off, consider making the links SE friendly-- vbulletin should have a module to do this... There's not much Google can index from domain.com/showthread.php?id=2342134

 

Yes, will changing to a nonstandard template help seo, I planned on doing it anyway but was waiting for a stable release or 3.5.

Gromkster- I've heard different. DP is one of the most indexed forums on the net (I swear I find them all the time when googling stuff not even related to seo) and Shawn said there was no need for a mod_rewrite.

 

Two weeks? That's the blink of an eye in SE terms...

If you've applied the SEO mods for vBulletin, just be patient and, as Dominic said, generate more new content... it will happen.

And see Google and Dynamic Pages:

and then go to http://www.vbwebmaster.com/forums/ for additional help.

 

Maybe I put it wrong, I didn't mean it to sound like Google will not index your page, just that it might not work as expected. Plus you miss the chance of using keyword density in the URL. Why else would anyone bother to configure SEF links?

 

There is no need to use mod_rewrite to get spidered, but spiders would've eaten, say, this page better if the URL was something like forums.digitalpoint.com/digital-point-forums/marketing/search-engine-optimization/google-not-touching-vbulletin

Got my point now?

 

I've had this debate more than once but I disagree. You really don't need mod_rewrite if you everything else right and the proff of that is how well indexed forums like this one and many others are without mod-rewrite. Add to that the fact that mod_rewrite does add some additional load onto the server and, since it isn't required for SE indexing and ranking well, why do it at all?

 

Following this judgement, you could also not use meta tags if you got everything else right, and so on. Drop only one trick-- everything should be just about the same, ey

This forum is well index. So are many others that don't use SEF URLs, hands down. These ones most likely don't need any more SEO work, but for a new site that wants to get spidered, why not use ANY technique available?

Also, mod_rewrite doesn't add that much overhead, unless we're talking about a really huge site (getpaidforum.com for example has 50k+ members and is still using SEF links). I believe I'll do some tests these days, I heard similar complaints before and you guys made me curious. Note that you don't have to use mod_rewrite for it at all, if you can settle for links like index.php/foo/bar/foobar, which are done with simple URL parsing.

 

Because it's overkill. Unnecessary. A waste of time and resources.

I mean, you're certainly free to do it if you wish but just do a search for any information and look at how often forum posts with SE freiendly URLs that DON'T use mod-rewrite come up -- that more than any rhetoric you'll ever see on a forum should tell you it just isn't necessary.

And one of my fundamental rules for life is: Don't use a more difficult or complicated solution for anything that has a simpler solution available.

 

I've found that mod_rewrite for vBulletin is a complete waste of time. vBulleting forums get spiderwed/indexed just fine without mod_rewrite. If you're bored and want to kill some time go for it...but it's not really needed.

 

I have used mod-rewrite on some of my initial forays with forums, and I doubt I would waste the time to do it again, I do think it is unecessary. I even had an issue where google was not following things the same way MSN and Yahoo were, so they were not even getting HTML rewrites. And it had no problems.

Regardless, I have seen no evidence that Google has problems with those kinds of URLS and everything from Google itself says it does not have problems with those kind of urls.

 

You dont need the mod rewrite.

Here are some tips:

How to SEO your vBulletin Forum

Title and Description Changes for Better SEO

Tweaking your Forum for SEO

If you still think you need to do the mod rewrite, here is a thread on the subject: Mod Rewrite Vbulletin

I have 3 vbulletin forums, all are nicely spidered by yahoo, google and MSN.

If you question the ability of vBulletin to be spidered, look at vBulletin's support forum. GOOGLE has 1,390,000 pages indexed. Yahoo has 2,800,000 indexed. This forum is basically raw. There is no mod rewrite. The points we make at vBulletin Webmaster are to enhance SEO and help give you better rankings.

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My next few forum projects will be based off of useBB once it goes gold which already comes with mod_rewrite out of the box so we'll see how that goes.

As for vbulletin I always feared the "duplicate content" issues considering you'd have 4 copies of the same posts (regular showthread.php, mod_rewrite, printthread version, and archives) so I never tried it.

 

My Vbull forum is fairly new and from what I can tell Google is gobbling it up.

 

Google just seems to pick the one it likes and disregards the others.

 

Well the bot traffic has picked up but no more pages indexed. What about a rotating php rss feed, I messed with one but it seem kind of inflexible thought I'm not fimilar with to much rss. Waht do you guys use and how do you get it to help with your search engine process. I think an ulitmate mod would be and rss feed that adds the articles/news to your articles database for even more pages to get indexed.
I'm also a member of your site Joey, keep up the good work. Also if anyone is selling a vbulletin license let me know, I'd like to experiment with a new site and v3.5.

 

Are there still hosts doing this?