SEO for vbulletin - simple how to and tips

When I first bought vbulletin it was because it was the most search-friendly forum platform out there. It’s also very powerful and is the most effective at handling spam.

But as a SEO the optimisation of vbulletin for search engines has always been my primary concern.

Heck, it was how I learned SEO - how do you bring in more traffic without a budget? I found SEO as the answer for my forums, and became specialist enough to start my own SEO company for websites in general.

Here’s the problem, though - the fact that vbulletin disallows cookies for search engines is only the first step to search friendliness, and it comes with a lot of baggage you need to deal with.

One of the biggest problems with the vbulletin 3.x series is that there is a huge amount of duplicate content. And you simply can’t block it all with a robotos.txt without killing your main content.

Here’s an example of how extensively a *single* vbulletin thread can be duplicated:

- showthread (normal)
- archive
- printthread
- &mode=threaded
- &mode=linear
- mode=hybrid&t=
- &mode=threaded
- &goto=nextoldest
- &goto=nextnewest
- goto=newpost&t=
- goto=lastpost&t=

That’s no less than eleven different versions of the same forum thread.

Not good, huh?

So here’s a fe simple tips to make your forum more search engine friendly:

1. Settings

Don’t use a vb out of the box without playing with some settings first.

Take great care to decide what you want to actually have active and adjust settings as required.

You probably want to avoid threaded mode because of the duplicated URLs, and because your site allows spiders in anyway there’s really no need to use the static archive - killing both of these features helps reduce duplicate content that can bring visitors into your most unattractive pages.

2. Feeds

Feeds are the in thing, and vbulletin comes ready built with XML, RSS, and Javascript feeds - so use them!

They are inactive by default in a new install, so look for the option at the bottom of the Admin Options section, and activate at least XML and RSS.

Then publish a link (preferably a feed graphic) prominently on the site - spiders love indexing feeds.

3. Title

One of the simplest, but when naming your forum even just in the admin panel, be descriptive and use keywords.

For example, if you run a forum for vbulletin admins, don’t title it “The Forum Factory for admins” but something like “vbulletin admin forums - tips and tricks”.

Get the picture?

4. Personalisation

Probably the most overlooked element is getting messy with some of the coding to personalise some of your features.

For example, on one forum I’ve always pushed hard with, I force new members to select their location from a menu during registration - then this is published in the user information beside every post.

Result? You just set up your threads for a range of local searches…

5. Mod_rewrite

There are a number of mod_rewrite solutions out there, whose main aim is to - rewrite the URLs, of course.

But it can go much further than that. For example, vbseo is an extremely powerful mod_rewrite solution that get’s rid of pretty much all of the duplicated content URLs posted above.

Plus a really good mod_rewrite solution will give you a lot of flexibility with the URLs - limiting use of words from thread titles, using numbers instead if required, determining if the thread URLs should be standalone or include keywords for the board the thread is posted on (ie, .com/thread-title-11.html vs .com/seo-board/thread-title-11.html) and so on.

There are a few different mod_rewrite solutions out there, some of which include:
vbseo - the most powerful and easy to install. Also include ping features - but costs $160.
Zoints SEO - this one is free but has fewer features, and requires some manual set up
Daniweb mod_rewrite - another free one, this requires quite a bit of template editing

6. Community leadership

The best way to SEO a vbulletin is to have an active and constructive community in the first place - people providing content via discussions gives you something to leverage.

That means learning to be a benign dictator - leading a community while still taking on the concerns of its members.

Anyway, that’s a few tips - if anyone wants any more I’ll extend this to cover anything else I can dig out.