Have you considered using the SE friendly URL structure feature that is in VB4? We have successfully implemented it on my forum > http://www.tvworlds.com I think it one of the best new features in VB4 personally and am very pleased it is now included.
Well Smyrl that is a good question and here is my thoughts from the experience I have had. When my forum was on VB3 I had the same thing happening, posts getting listed (sometimes straight on to page 1) sometimes in a matter of minutes and usually due to the "Title" of the first post. Which I usually use in the obvious ways to manipulate things so I get threads highly listed for those search terms. What I have noticed though is that after a while these rankings drop down a bit, sometimes down to page 3 or 4 sometimes even lower. Since upgrading to VB4 and putting the SE friendly URL structure in I think I am noticing that pages are staying onger in place. Now I have not had things in place long enough yet to fully confirm this is so, but it is looking that way. Here is why I think this is likely the case > Google URL Structure Google quite clearly (for a change) say that Googlebot prefers the exact hyphenated structure the use of VB4's new system uses, so this in my short and limited experience points towrds pages using it being treated as stronger (or higher ranked and more stably so) in their index. So from what I have seen thus far although pages may take an immediate place highly ranked they have a tendency to start to drop, sometimes relatively quickly, at other times slowly and bit by bit. By using the SE firendly URL's and helping make Googlebot's job easier as Google say their self on that page I linked this occurence is looking to be less likely to happen.
We tested it when we were running our test forum before we upgraded. It was causing more issues than it solved, so I disabled it. I'll revisit it in a future version and see if they fixed the issues I had with it or not. Plus it makes URLs look God awful in my opinion.
God awful! I am gonna have to beg to differ there Shawn. I think descriptive URL's look much nicer myself. Plus you also get the benefit of the URL's being searchable and readable and displaying in the likes of Google as something that adds more info for users. It also is one of those cases where personal preference or opinion has to be put aside and over ridden by what is better for users and also as Google say for Googlebot. I think (and I will update later once I have had time to truly see the effects) it will also make a vast difference to the longevity of search results. Also at the end of the day nobody is searching for "show thread" so any boost SE friendly URL's can give to rankings has tp be a plus imho.