I have just noticed some strange things with Google PR and Vbulletin the inner pages of vbulletin sites with ?blabla do not have Google PR showing on them the library .htm versions have PR on them yet the forum ?blabla pages rank reasonably well Does anyone else notice this on other dynamic sites? What PR are the seemingly PR0 forum pages and other PR0 dynamic pages passing to the pages they link to? Would it therefore be better to have a rewrite and hack to have t1234.htm rather than ?t=1234
They show as having PR for me... although any recent thread is not going to show because it hasn't been an update since it was created.
The thing that annoys me with vBulletin is how it links back to index.php. I notice Digital Point's forums don't do this. How do you change this?
Me again Real crazy - I removed the Google toolbar and reinstalled. Still no PR showing on say http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=5 Yet, when I add that url to the PR tracker, it shows PR4, which makes sense. I have tried it on one of my pages - toolbar 0, PR3 on PR tracker. When I come in via Google "Google Forum", I see the PR4. Rather confusing. At least there is PR, but a very interesting bug.
Search in the templates for $vboptions[forumhome].php and delete where possible - use / instead, or whatever your path is. Or change the default to your correct path rather than index See the following thread where Shaun uses the search replace feature of vbulletin to get rid of the index.php - vbulletin 3 changes
For the index.php thing, I used the built in replacement function, rather than try to hit every place it might be in.
Yes, forum home is what requires editing - it's not actually very hard. I'm going to have to write a general topic on vBulletins and SEO. As for the PR on vBulletins - in my experience, the Google Toolbar in general tends to have problems displaying PR for a lot of dynamic pages - either none will be displayed, or else a "guess". The toolbar has no problems with static files, though, which is why any archive should theoretically show PR.
Yeah... my replacement thing ended up fixing all the other URLs as well though (the ones with a trailing ? on them).
See my Search Engine Optimizing VBulletin thread on my Time2Dine forum. I am also starting to get heard over at VBulletin - looks like some of my hacks may be taken on board for the main version. I would be very interested in hearing your ideas One extra thing I am realizing is that quite apart from the many URL's in VBulletin for the spiders, there are many url's that users see as well, including url's in email notifications. If people link back to these "wrong" url's, the PR/link text value of them back into the site is obviously less than if they had linked to the main seo'ed version of that url. I hope this bug gets fixed by Google soon. It makes it that much harder for getting recip links. People would be encouraged to post that much more if they visibly saw PR on each thread I have a directory using index.php?x url's, and will be changing it to phrase.htm so people can see the PR better.
Truthfully, I don't think it's about dynamic URLs at all... rather that most URLs never existed at the time of the last update (ones based on posts and threads for example). If you look at URLs here, they all seem to have PageRank where they should... for example... PR5: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/faq.php?faq=revenue_sharing PR4: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=519 (a thread old enough to have PageRank) Even obscure pages with lots of parameters have PageRank: PR3: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/online.php?&order=desc&sort=time&pp=20&page=1&who=&ua=
Thanks for the index.php help. I just started my forum on May 14 and it got PR in the last update. index.php actually has a PR of 5 with no external backlinks while http://www.golfrewind.com has a PR of 4. Edit: Got it working. Thanks for the help!
Rather hit and miss... Some pages have PR0 when you are flicking through a website, but when you search for that particular page, you get to see the PR. Its all a bit hit and miss with the dynamic url's.
Not sure about the PR0 you are seeing on that URL, but it always shows PR4 for me. Even external PR reporters report it as such: http://rankwhere.com/google-page-rank.php?url=http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=519