Thread Preview - Detrimental to SEO.

[rob]

Personally, I think the thread preview's are detrimental to SEO.

If you have a lets say you have a one of your forums all about a topic... lets say 'vBulletin' for instance.

By nature, thread titles in the link's URL text will often contain 'vB', 'vBulletin', 'Forum', and other related keywords contributory to the page as a whole.

Now, I know titles (as in title="blah, blah") dont count for that much, but they surely have the effect of diluting the keywords..... not to mention the fact that they add a lot more code to the page and so the code / content ratio's are affected... and the keyword ratio's also suffer.

Just my $2

[Michael]

Surely by adding in keywords such as vBulletin the keyword ratio improves and thus its content relevancy improves, and thus Google and other search engines view the page with greater importance for queries such as vBulletin?

[rob]

The ratio is IMPROVED by having ONLY thread titles (As normal) and DECREASED when thread preview is on.....

Michael, I think you misread / misunderstood my post.

[rob]

After re-reading my post, I noticed my meaning was a little unclear having two seperate meanings for title..... one meaning the thread title within the url's link text... and the second referal to title, I meant the 'title="blah, blah"' text as used for topic preview (on hover)

Sorry Michael for the confusion.... my mistake. (I amended the above post accordingly)

[Joe Ward]

I agree with you Rob. And it would certainly have an effect on the filesize (increase), Content-to-Code Ratio (decrease), and keyword relevancy (decrease).

[Juan Muriente]

This idea/suggestion has been adopted as a feature (control) via the vBSEO CP. In version 2.3.3 users will have the ability to disable thread preview text for forumdisplay & similar threads .

[Juan Muriente]

** Moved to feature requests **

[rob]

Thanks

Judging by your signature change, I'll be heading on over to downloads in a bit.

[Keith Cohen]

This idea/suggestion has been adopted as a feature (control) via the vBSEO CP. In version 2.3.3 users will have the ability to disable thread preview text for forumdisplay & similar threads .

This is an option in vBulletin itself, so wouldn't it be less server-intensive to just turn it off there instead of having vbSEO strip it back out afterwards? (Or am I misunderstanding this option?)

FWIW, I have thread previews disabled on my site anyway. I find them very annoying.

[rob]

they are arent they... lol

[Juan Muriente]

This is an option in vBulletin itself, so wouldn't it be less server-intensive to just turn it off there instead of having vbSEO strip it back out afterwards? (Or am I misunderstanding this option?)

FWIW, I have thread previews disabled on my site anyway. I find them very annoying.

I'll change my nick to "overhead enemy" - We've done it as a plugin (works only on vB 3.5.x) and located the controls (on/off switches) in the vbseocp, one for forumdisplay and one for similar threads. Overhead is ...none .

Since it might be considered SEO related (thanks Rob), we thought it would be nice to have the option within the vBSEO CP.

[rob]

nice touch!

give it the yahoo style little 'new' icon

[Juan Muriente]

absolutely

[Mike]

I can picture Rob right now, walking down a sidewalk and suddently slapping himself in the head thinking "damn, I got that preview option turned on and I suddenly realized it is bad for my forum".

Rob then runs all the way back home, knocking people down who get in the way, to turn it off....

Sorry, had to let that out..

I have no idea why this would cause a problem, but you guys know a ton more about this than me, so I am turning it off in my forum right away.

[BamaStangGuy]

I find the Thread View to be very useful and I could not get away with turning it off on my site as my members do like it.