Disabling thread preview text for guests

[MoMan]

vBSEO has the option to disable thread preview text for guests.

How useful would this be should I decide to enable it? Wouldn't it hurt SEO, as lots of keywords would disappear from forumdisplay as a result?

[Brian Cummiskey]

The point of this option is to remove all the bloat surrounding the links to your main areas. Forumdisplayhas no real content on it except links to subforums and threads. When putting text around all these links, the page can lose on-page SEO focus of what it really is--- a link 'index' page, not a content page.

[MoMan]

Thanks for the insight! You mean forumdisplay, right?

[Brian Cummiskey]

Sorry, yes, forumdisplay. updated post.

[MoMan]

Do you know what the config variable for this is? As you may have seen in a recent ticket, my vbseocp is temporarily broken for some strange reason.

[Brian Cummiskey]

Vbseo_code_cleanup_preview

[Nicke]

I did something else recently, which worked great, I used RR to add forum name + "forum:" to the beginning of each thread preview, so each forumdisplay is ranked a lot higher if you search for that specific forum. The title of each forum has the same phrase.

[MoMan]

Very interesting approach! What does the vbseo staff think about this?

BTW- thanks for the info on the variable, Brian.

[Brian Cummiskey]

It has it's plus and minuses....

on the plus side, it will help for direct searches, "XYZ FORUM" but it may hurt the long tail for more generic searches, "XYZ"

[MoMan]

What I did on my forum instead is I linked all the tag icons to the the page listing threads for their first respective tags. That should increase search engine results for each keyword, I think.

So, if thread x is tagged with "k-x" and "camera", the icon's alt text would be "k-x, camera" and the link would go to /tags/k-x/.