vBulletin optimization

My SEO hack ...
Create a Google sitemap (On DaniWeb, I've written my own sitemap script, but I believe that there's a plugin version on vbulletin.org) ...

Other than that, vBulletin is pretty seo-friendly out of the box.

My SEO hack ...
Create a Google sitemap (On DaniWeb, I've written my own sitemap script, but I believe that there's a plugin version on vbulletin.org) ...

Other than that, vBulletin is pretty seo-friendly out of the box.

What is the importance of the url rewrite for vBulletin?
On home, you chose to print the last blogs articles, why do not use the last forums posts?

The reason the latest blog entries as opposed to the latest forum threads are featured on our homepage is because the blog entries are more mainstream and appeal to the majority of our audience. Additionally, they give an overall impression of what DaniWeb is all about. Most forum threads, on the other hand, are support-related questions which have a very narrow targeted audience. A question involving debugging someone's C++ program, for example, isn't going to be of interest to the majority of people coming in through our homepage.

Get rid of duplicate content
The search engine only access your site as a visitor, now if visitors see the Quote, or Reply, or Print features, then the search engine will follow those links and index the content.
What do you end up with?
Multiple links to the same content. This is called "duplicate content" and can ruin your site in the search engine rankings.
These two links go to the same page, yet to a search engine are completely different. It will think I have two pages with the same text on them. (that is why I have stopped them as actual links)
mysite.com/xmb/viewthread.php?fid=6&tid=3702&action=printable
and
mysite.com/xmb/viewthread.php?tid=3702
how to remove it?
Remove any instance where a guest might have access to the same content from two different URLS.
I did this by bracketing some of the code so that only members will see it.
if ( X_MEMBER ) {
code here
}
Your code names might be different but the concept is the same. Visitors here do not see any of the tools, - Reply, Quote, Print etc that members see.
While you are at it get rid of any links that do not point to content you want indexed
Message boards go in for feature bloat, but search engines like simplicity. So don't let the visiting bot have access to any places you don't want indexed, these might include members profiles, members lists. FAQ's.
Get rid of all links to places you don't want indexed. You can cut them out using the Robots.txt file. I have. But I found that many of the searching bots ignore it. So cut the information out at the source.
So visitors to the board don't see the links to the members names, and many other features.
This is also good SEO (search engine optimization) generally to cut out links from your site to places that are not directly related to the content. So have links in your content to sites with the same type of content, but remove links to places where the content is not the same type.
Get active metatags on your board
I have made the title metatag using the Title of the post that is made. It generates easily enough with the title variable in it.
The description metatag is the first 150 letters of the post.
This then means you need to write your posts with that in mind. A good descriptive heading, and a summery in the beginning of the post.
to be extra sure I have the title at the very top of the html as H1 text
Get all the text not needed off the board.
Extraneous text only serves to dilute the meaning of your post to the search engines. they read all the text in the profile, the links, the buttons, etc and add that together as the content of the page.
Turn all text that is not relevant to the post into graphics. At the top of my page the 4 links there are deliberately pictures, not text.
Strip the forum bloat out
This is a philosophical issue, as well as practical. Who the heck in their right mind is going to join a board just to get stars by their name and some stupid stats to boost their egos? Again this dilutes the content of the post with extraneous words, but also puts coding and complexity that is unnecessary.
Get rid of it all, and avoid forum bloat by really thinking if what you want to do adds value to the site for the search engines and the visitors.
Simplify, simplify, simplify
Really, if there is no real need for it get it out.
Take tables for example, now bots are not upset by how many tables you have on your site, but to decrease files sizes and make changing easier remove as much of the table structure as you can. Many of my pages are now table free. sometimes bots only index the first 50 or so lines. get out anything that pushes your content below that range.
Clean up your header
Sometimes looking at the code in the header of a message board can make me cringe. You have miles of CSS squashed in, form code, BBcode functions, and heaps of other crap that only serves to push your content, the actual words on your page that are so important, to the bottom of the page.
Get it all cut down. Try and externalise the Jscript, and the CSS, and move as much code out to the footer as you can.
You will see on my pages that it sometimes generates an error message in the bottom left of your browser,thats because I moved the BBcode function out of the header to the footer. Its huge, ugly and in the wrong place. Eventually I will work out how to stop the error but that better than losing 100's of lines of your code to unnecessary stuff.
There will be more to come on this topic but I hope this helps people to get better indexing in search engines and more income from their adsense. It sure has for me.
Get links to your content
Old content is not bad content. There are many posts from years back that will still be accessed by people if they knew they existed.
Every thread on your page is potential page in a search engine, and potential doorways to gain visitors and income for your site. Don't neglect the old threads.
Sometimes the path to old content is too deep for the search engines to index. You need to bring that path to a more manageable level.
On one hand this is the most obvious section. get as many links on other pages to the content on your board. however there are methods of doing this that you may not have considered in the past.
Create a sitemap and keep it updated
A sitemap gives the links to your threads all in one file. The search engines will read through the sitemap and record the threads posted there regardlesss of date.
Join Googles sitemap program and get your sitemap indexed in their system. It give you an instant entry into the search engine!
Other search engines, such as yahoo and MSN also have their own programs. (links to them are somewhere here in the forum, I forget where just now)
Keep your sitemap updated on a monthly basis and reinclude it to the search engines.
Creating a sitemap using an existing program I use this one http://www.micro-sys.dk/products/sitemap-generator/ also helps you to just what the bots are indexing, if there is too much rubbish being listed, then use some of the tricks mentioned to make those liks disappear.
Put links to your content on vanilla html pages
Create pages that hold the links to your threads. For example threads from my Military forum are listed here on their own html page. This page has good ranking in google itself, and feeds many people through to board threads.
The search engines index those html pages and link directly to the threads regardless of their age.
Note in the index page of the site that there are many links to threads on the board. (OK the page needs some work but that not what I am talking about). This serves to give the search engines and the humans as many opportunities to find the content as possible.
Note that the thread titles are written to reflect their content as well. yet another way that search engines can accurately index your posts.
Get linking pages high in your code
At the top of this page are two links, one to "recent posts" and the other to "what people are reading"
By having this content at the top of the page the search engines are more likely to follow the links and index the threads.
"Recent posts" is often called by another name on other boards, but usually only show posts in the past 24 hours. Whats use is that?
I found the code and bumped it up to show an entire week of posts. That gave yet another path for the search engines to find the fresh content.
"What are people reading" is the old Who's Online, which shows the pages being accessed in the last 10 minutes.
This is an underutilised source of internal links to your board.
From following this I can often see that google searches are hitting old and good content.
Get links to content higher up the page in the code
Look at my index page and you will see that on the top left of the page are the links to the last 25 posts. In the code these links are very near the top and so are more likely to be followed.
If I had it in the right column, then it would be at the end of the code and much less likely to be followed by the bots.
Give many possablilites for people and bots to see content using different routes
The "last 40 images" is a method I used by which people can see older posts on the site in a differnet, in this care image, format. Images can stand alone and provide an alternative way by which viewers can see your content.
Of course its less useful for the bots as there is no text in the hyperlink, one day I might rectify that with the thread title above the picture. Just as soon as I can work out the sql code.
This is still a growing topic area but I hope that I have given people some ideas to getting their message board system better linked in the search engines.

I've heard that the SEO version of vBulletin 'vBSEO' (http://www.crawlability.com/vbseo/) is really good, not used it personally so i don't know. Any of you guys used it?

vBSEO has some advanced and very customizable features, but personally I don't think all that is necessary. Keep it simple.

vBSEO has some advanced and very customizable features, but personally I don't think all that is necessary. Keep it simple.

To True, Guess that's how i survive in life lol.