Heap of Numbers in the forum footer

[aacircle]

As a guest to a forum using vbSEO, there are a heap of numbers in the forum footer with links to forum pages.

Can this be turned off, and if so, any real setbacks? I noticed the forums here do not have the numbers when viewing as guest.

Thanks.

[Mert Gökçeimam]

That is a feature of vBSEO you can turn it off from vbseocp.php

Look for Footer Archive Links in vBSEO control panel

[aacircle]

Thank you. Don't think it will make a heap of difference to getting PR into forum pages with it off.

Thanks.

[T2DMan]

Are you aware of what the footer links are doing, and why they are there??? They started up at my insistance and have good reason for their existence.

The concept is that we need the most amount of Google PR, to the inner pages, the threads that provide the long tail of searches into our sites.

We need the least number of clicks to get through to the "real" content of our sites. The smaller number of clicks, the most Google PR, and the most weight for the link anchor text.

If we have a link to a page on every page of our site, then that page will start to get approx equal to the PR of the index page. Taking that concept, if we link to each of the main archive pages from every page of our sites, we are getting the max possible Google PR to those pages, and therefore to the threads.

I have thousands of threads of PR3 and 4 on my forum based on a PR6 in my index page. Yes, I also have many external links to threads one thread now being a PR6, but the main reason for the high PR, and high SERP's for each thread is the high PR and the small distance any thread is away from pages that are receiving external links.

Too many footer links can be too many

Now it does become an issue when we have hundreds of forumdisplay's/forums in our forum, and tens of thousands of threads. We have to start linking to the main archive sitemaps rather than to each forum. We may even link only to the forums that are the most highly trafficked, or most need the actual boost in the SERP's. So there does become a time when the automated nature of the footer links does not work, and we need to manually create and maintain the archive links. But be strategic about it. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[aacircle]

Thanks T2DMan for your detailed response. Much appreciated.

Yeh, I did read up on an article the other day about click distance and PR, and you've even mentioned it above. Cool!

I have put the Archive Footer links back. I was aware of its purpose, but we must also decide how far we should go in cluttering the screen for the sake of gaining high rankings. But then again, our jobs as webmasters is to let as many people know as possible about our great content.

For Anime Online we have a heap of forums and the overload of archive links is an eyesore. So maybe it's time to manually add the links in the footer template. For ESL Forums - Teaching Community, it's really not an eyesore.

Once again, thanks for your comments.

[T2DMan]

I put together a forum the other day where I added around 500 forums. Thats over 500 footer links.

Now even with numbers, thats a lot of screen space. And it sure plays havoc with the PR less one limit of around 70 links per page.

So its not always an easy question to find an answer to.

One thing for sure, the site is in need of lots of Google PR to drive all those pages to the top.

[aacircle]

500+ footer links? Crikeys mate!

Yes, Anime Online has 0 PR on most forums. Only the home page holds PR 6. vbSEO was only implemented 1 month ago, and I have yet to see any change in traffic. If anything, there has been a huge drop in traffic. I will give vbSEO a proper run though of up to 3 months before giving up hope.

vbSEO works great over at ESL Forums - Teaching Community though.

[T2DMan]

Hi again

Just had a look at your anime site. Recognised lots of my recommendations. However, remember that you need to tweak the meta description. It has to include the search phrase to be able to get that used in the Google snippet. See my thread, and how I have done my forum for inspiration.

The footer can look better when its narrowed - add a div for say 50% width so that the links don't go right to the edge. That would tidy it up.

Remember also to take the CSS to its own file. Speeds up page downloads for people and makes text higher on the page.

Then its just a matter of time.

I have just got some nice increases in SERPs after several years of trying hard. Yes, years. And all of a sudden wham, you get raced to the top. Its a nice feeling. But still got some new pages (competitive phrases) that are working their way up. They come on at 100th, and work their way up over the months. The pages that have been around are now top 3 for some phrases, so I know that the 100's will get to that same position. Patience is hard, but you get used to it. Just have many things on the go at any one time.

[T2DMan]

Did you remember to turn on the "show old url's" for your xml sitemap. This will help the transition from old to new.

Do you need to show the posts in the sitemap? I have played with this one. I have had some indented results with posts. But rather a ghastly user experience seeing a page with no navigation, and only a direction to close that window. I personally have reverted back to not showing posts.

If you were to do posts, you would really need to properly seo them, and add a header/footer to the page to make them in keeping with the rest of the site. Its something I have not bothered to do on any of the sites I have SEO'ed. Its enough of a task just getting the normal pages ranked.