By default, all of the pages in an Invision forum are along the lines of index.php?showforum=XX and index.php?showtopic=XX

This is not too search engine friendly because of the query strings in the URLs. It's better to have clean URLs such as /showforum/XX/ or /showforumXX.html

I really don't have much experience personally with Invision to be able to help you do this. What I will say is that you need to use mod_rewrite in an .htaccess file to rewrite the URLs. Check out some other threads on mod_rewrite here to figure out how to do that.

Then, you'll have to edit your Invision forum templates. More specifically, the forum index and the actual forums showing the threads - and wherever it has a reference to go to index.php?... edit it out to look like threadXX.html or forumXX.html

Did that make sense? If not, I'll try to offer more assistance.

yeah i would recommend using the mod_rewrite i personally havent used it yet on my invision forum but i know you can. and there is also a search engine friendly mod that you can add to the invision forum i personally havent had much problem getting indexed but i need to do the mod_rewrite to get more of my pages indexed :)

Well, as you can see, I use vBulletin, which will run you $160. The best free forum systems are Invision and phpBB. Invision I have absolutely no experience, so perhaps I'm not the best person to offer assistance.

However, the quick answer is: "no, Invision and phpBB both are not search engine friendly out of the box. They both require a mod/hack to make them so. Instructions to apply such hacks are available from the respective forum communities. i.e. for phpBB, you can find info at www.phpbbhacks.com" My previous post was basically an explanantion of what these hacks do.

i dont believe there are any forum software that come completely search engine friendly. and for vb at 160 for an owned lisence is not to bad for a great piece of software. but invision atleast you can use it for free but you wont get any support out of invision themselfs unless you buy a lisence and i have heard that when 2.0 comes out you will have a little tag at the bottom of the forum that says trail version. but if you would want invision support you are paying 199 for a owned license for ever :) but i dont know. i really like invision and there is alot that really like vb. it is an on going debate between forum owners :)

vbulletin 3 is search engine spiderable out of the box - Invision Power Boards are supposed to be, but from what I've seen spiders will only ever index a fraction of the 1.2 and prior releases. Apparently, that issue is being addressed in the current beta version (is it IPB 2??).