Hi all,

I've just spent the last hour or so reading the posts relating to phpbb v vBulletin here. The main issues everyone seems to have with phpbb are security/spam related.

I have phpbb installed on my website and I have added a ton of mods to it so that over time it has become exactly what I want and gets little or no spam. So I'm kind of reluctant to switch over to vBulletin unless the benefits outweigh the negative side effects of a switchover/cost etc.

The reason I feel I should switch is because after almost a year the site does not rank very high on Google and after a lot of research and reading a lot of posts I have come to the conclusion that most people think phpbb sucks in the SEO dept. Is this the case? I've Googled the bejaysus out of optomising phpbb for search engines and done all the reccomended things like getting rid of session ids etc, but the traffic to the site still seems to be a bit low. Does anyone have an opinion on this?

Thanks
C

vBulletin is much more SE friendly out of the box then phpbb. You have to modify phpbb to be search engine friendly (at least in version 2.x).

With mods such as removing session IDs and using mod_rewrite to rename your forum and thread pages with .html extensions, I see no reason why phpBB can't be just as SEO friendly as vBulletin. I don't think that it's realistic to expect that if you switch to vB tonight, miraculously your site will rank #1 tomorrow.

Yeah, the mods exist. The big issue with that is every time you upgrade your software you have to reinstall the mods. I think phpbb 3.0 is SE friendly out of the box but don't quote me on that.

Yeah that's the dilemma I'm now facing, I'm not too bothered tho, I don't need any whistles and bells and the functionality of the present installation is more than sufficent.
As cscgal said with mod_rewrite and session ids it should be ok. I've reformatted the content in a more Google-friendly way and wil lgive that a while to see if it has a noticable effect. Otherwise I'll just take the plunge and switch to vBulletin.

Thanks to you both

sure VB is seo friendly there is no doubt for that.

Sorry for quoting you on it! Anyway, yes I installed 3.0 on a local machine and I'm looking at the cursed "&sid=", I guess that's one feature they didn't get rid of :!:

That sucks. Looks like a hack will be required to correct that again.

I went from fully modded phpbb to vbb with a mod called vbseo. I noticed a night and day diffence. Imo it was worth it for my business. Because i went from being 100 or so in google to number 1 and i show up for all sorts of odd ball search terms.

Even without the mod you would get results because phpbb is not SE friendly out of the box. But if you have used a mod in it it would do just as well as vBulletin. Kind of not fair to go out of your way to make one SE friendly then say it is so much better then the one that you didn't make search engine friendly.