vbulletin SEO

When it comes to SEO for vbulletin, there are a few simple approaches you can take that most vb admins simply do not understand:

1. Duplicate content

I’ve already listed some of the serious duplicate content problems that vbulletin has, and how to address them.

However, despite being given a SEO perspective, some vb admins think they are immune from duplicate content problems.

As Mikkel states:

[B]ased on years of experience with a high number of different dysnmic web publishing systems… duplicate content remains to be a problem, that is a fact. If you don’t want to deal with it, thats your choice. … Leaving the search engines to prioritize your pages is just not very smart SEO. You can do that if you like, and probably do OK, but the smarter SEO will outrank you any day with a more well focused strategy.

Bottom line is that a SEO needs to control duplicate content and help search engines find the main content - while at the same time removing access to the duplicate content.

2. mod_Rewrite

A lot of people think that mod_rewrite is simply a matter of making content easier to index.

It isn’t. A big part of mod_rewrite is simplifying URLs, not least to add keywords so that they are easier for both human users and search engines to use.

Seriously, which says most about a page on URL alone:

/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=69

or would this look better?

/forums/seo/

:)

Still, many vb admins think that because their dynamic pages and/or their vb static archive pages get indexed, that therefore the main content doesn’t need rewriting - which is completely missing the point of mod_rewrite in the first place.

3. Link equity

An easily overlooked point about vbulletin SEO is that there are a lot of pages that you seriously don’t need indexed.

For example, the memberlist and calendar are basic offenders when it comes to generating a lot of pages and content that are not simply useless to your forum in SEO terms - but also end up spreading your link equity into these useless pages.

There are two simple ways to address this:

1. Remove both of these from your navbit template.
2. Block these areas with a robots.txt file

Normally I would do number 1, but I’m now looking to implement the second option on all of my forums, simply because it’s a more surefire way of addressing the problem.

Overall vbulletin SEO

The points above and my previous entries on SEO for vbulletin should hopefully help any vbulletin admins out there better SEO their forums - if they really want to.

I suspect this won’t be the case, because whenever I raise the issue of vb seo, my words simply fall on deaf ears.

I have better things to do with my time than provide free consultancy for an audience that isn’t even listening.

Bottom line, I think, is that it takes someone with a serious interest in vb seo to really approach the issue properly - and that it tends to be SEO’s, rather than general vbulletin admins, who qualify for that.