Hi, I was just wondering what your thoughts are on this strategy for vbulletin forums. There is currently a Plugin available for vbulletin that directs search engines to the archives exclusively via a 301 redirect, and when a user clicks a search result they are redirected to the original post, not the archive. The plugin also makes a google sitemap and submits it to google, but my main question is do you think this is a better strategy than using spider friendly url's?
From experience, I have used spider friendly urls in the past, in fact I used the 3.0.x SEO rewrite from here and it worked great, but moving to 3.5 I needed to switch, so I am testing this out. So far Yahoo seems to love it, MSN and Ask seem the same, and google is definitely indexing the archives, but I haven't seen a drastic change in google just yet.
On a side note, I did consider that engines may see this as spoofing, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be since, aside from more heavily coded pages, the engines are seeing the same content as the user.
So, what are your thoughts? I know there is a lot of SEO experience on this forum, so lets have it.