Promoting Threads to Articles w/vbseo - Will it be consider Duplicate pages?

[Brian Cummiskey]

Correct, the article comments forum is a big disaster. Luckily, you can robots.txt out /cms-comments/ or whatever it is called on your system to stop the bots from indexing it, but still allowing guests to view it.

[joeman]

Hello Joe,
There is no way to avoid/prevent duplicated threads if you plan using CMS.
Only one way you can handle it closing comments area on cms to anyone else and doing as Brian said. But that causes breaking community..

Choose one, CMS or Forum threads. I hope vbulletin would find a solution for that if they focus on product not to claims blabla..
I prefer to use it for announcements and news related with my site niche. Not many threads, once a week.

Thanks for the response. I also hope that vbulletin finds a solution to this.
So you are saying that you use the CMS only for announcements and news correct? By using the CMS itself for those items without the forum, how has its ranking been so far in getting organic SEO results?

Actually you are completely wrong.

If you disable promoting threads to articles , there is no way you'll face duplicate items.

Ok so if I do what adom81 is doing and eliminate the whole idea of article promotion then I will have no issue of any duplicate content correct?

Instead I can create a article in the CMS with a small piece of info with maybe a picture and a sentence or two and then create a link within the article which links to the forum with a forum post that has all the photos with all the article info... and this should work better than the promote to article system?

Google will still find the urls on your homepage. The best way to deal with this is disabling Promotion option and creating unique articles

Are you talking about the URL that says at the bottom of the article that was promoted which says "view original post" link?

Correct, the article comments forum is a big disaster. Luckily, you can robots.txt out /cms-comments/ or whatever it is called on your system to stop the bots from indexing it, but still allowing guests to view it.

Thanks everyone for all your responses I greatly appreciate it. This is my first website and first time I am using vbulletin so I want to try and get things right.


By the way I found this post on the vbulletin.com site about a guy saying that the CMS is terrible for creating organic SEO. What do all of you think about this?

CMS Will 4.1 address the retarded article system ?

[Brian Cummiskey]

The CMS still has a long way to go. Its still early in its lifecycle. A better product in the future is all we can hope for.

[joeman]

The CMS still has a long way to go. Its still early in its lifecycle. A better product in the future is all we can hope for.

Since last month have you noticed any improvements yet with the CMS at all as far as SEO and better functionality?

I completely did away with the promote to article function and instead am keeping my CMS completely separate from the forum to avoid all the duplicate content issues you had brought up.

Now that I have seperated the two, how do you feel about the CMS comments option?
I noticed something weird that if someone were to click on an article it actually creates a new forum page, for example Example Web Page/vbcms-comments which has a link to the article which only states: "You can view the page at:" and then that particular article.

While I have heard it is good practice to link pages within your website for better SEO, is this something that is good or bad? I am new to all of this so any help is greatly appreciated...

What do you suggest?

[Brian Cummiskey]

AFAIK, 4.0.8 has not addressed this at all.

You SHOULD interlink your articles inline.

[joeman]

AFAIK, 4.0.8 has not addressed this at all.

You SHOULD interlink your articles inline.

Thanks for replying Brian. What does that mean exactly to interlink the articles inline?

[Brian Cummiskey]

When you make a post, you should link to the key words within sentences pointing to internal resources. i used external here, but you get the idea...

ie,

Google is a neat search engine and vbseo is awesome.

[joeman]

When you make a post, you should link to the key words within sentences pointing to internal resources. i used external here, but you get the idea...

ie,

Google is a neat search engine and vbseo is awesome.

Oh ok I understand what you mean thanks Brian I will definitely do that.

Also I'm noticing some of my CMS articles are starting to index with Google and I have kept them completely separate from the forum so that must help by completely doing away with the promote thing.

[joeman]

When you make a post, you should link to the key words within sentences pointing to internal resources. i used external here, but you get the idea...

ie,

Google is a neat search engine and vbseo is awesome.

I started working on this in my CMS articles and noticed that each link opens in a new page... Since I am making the vb CMS to function as a somewhat traditional website the new window opening every time a user clicks the link may frustrate the user. Is there any way to create these links in the CMS articles but have it open up in the same page with vbulletin 4?
Thanks

[Brian Cummiskey]

I believe you will need to alter core vb scripts to change this as there is no setting to change this.

[joeman]

I believe you will need to alter core vb scripts to change this as there is no setting to change this.

Ok thanks Brian, I'll search around for a way to do that.