Hi Folks, I am about to start working on a message board - this site looks like a great resource for me! I have been reading up alot on which software is better to use - but I have not been able to find alot of information about which software will get spidered better? Any idea? I definitely want to pick one that the search engines will pick up. Thanks!
Without making any mods/hacks to it, vBulletin will be spidered better. But as I'm sure phpBB lovers will jump in and tell you, with a little hacking, you can make it just as spiderable. Also, phpBB is free, so if you are looking for something free, that's the way to go.
I am a beginner, so if by "hacking" you mean adjusting code - I can't do that. Can anyone speak to that? Thank you so much for the help!
You would need to "adjust some code" to make phpbb search friendly. If you have the $ I would also suggest vBulletin. It's worth it.
Nope... The only thing that is remotely SEOish I did was change the <title> tags in the template for threads to not include the default name of the forum "Digital Point Forums" Seems pointless to me to have that in every page.
Ok, thanks. I'm trying to understand why DP can rank so highly and so quickly for terms while another popular vB forum (health), which has about 1/4 million pages indexed in Google, seems to be invisible in the serps. Must be the inbound link factor I guess.
If you can search, copy and paste in Wordpad, you can apply phpbb script mods. They are very straightforward. That said, I prefer vB and would use it if the licensing cost was not an issue.
I believe to make a forum successful and attractive, it has to be personalized. So if you go for vB you are going to have to change the design because the default skin would be a turnoff, you would have to change the logo atleast. As for phpbb, it can be made equally sefriendly but as everyone keeps saying it requires hacks. To make a decision I would first thing about your target audience, to be on the safe side you could with phpbb first and when it becomes popular you could switch to vB.
I don't think that's entirely true. This forum (for the most part) uses the default vBulletin skin, and seems to be doing fine.
If this was the default vB skin this forum wouldn't be green, what I meant to say is you cannot install a forum and not do anything to customize it and then expect it to be successful. Got to make it look like your own and that you have full control over it (ie the webmaster will have to edit files etc).
The money VB costs is worth it in my opinion. You can have it SEO friendly and set up and running in less than an hour, with logos and colors edited to your taste. I figure the lack of aggrivation is money spend is well spend, and believe VB is also more secure. I actually got a virus a few months ago from a hacked phpbb forum.
Vb totally owns phpbb2.... I moved a enourmous forum from phpbb2 to vb and it runs so much better I cant even start... also the out of the box features are really nice.
That must cut way down on your moderating responsibilities They should market those boxes to homeless people...
I honestly spend about 90X more on these forums on my own... I have a great staff of volunteer mods... All I know is im not being hacked weekly and also the server load is 1/80th of what it was under phpbb2. VB is written so much better and w/zend optimizer i noticed such a huge performence increase I was able to drop 4 nodes from the cluster.
Anyone else have this experience with an A to B comparison? If so, that might be THE reason to switch...
I have modded a PHPBB 2 forum and I own a Vbulletin license and man Vbulletin is the best. 3.5 version is so awesome. The administration area of PHPBB sucks or should I say under powered. Vbulletin admin is very powerful and yet easy to configure stuff.