Question before installing

Hello vBSEOers!

My name is Julian and I'm very excited to install vBSEO on my forums. However I would like to ask some questions before doing so.

My forum is my main income generator and modifying the URL structure is a delicate process. I bought vBSEO yesterday and I have spent the last 12 hours reading the documentation, analyzing the available options and browsing through the forums. I am impressed by the amount of success stories but at the same time a little worried.

I have seen some cases where things did not go as planned and the user ended up with a devastated SERP. I know a lot of these problems are due to misconfigurations, modifying the URL structure after going live, etc. That's why I decided to post this thread and ask to the experienced users (that's you!) a few questions:

1. How to minimize any negative impact on the traffic of my forums coming from search engines just after installing vBSEO? Especially from Google. My traffic cannot dramatically drop because that will affect my income.
2. I understand that the standard vBulletin installation generates a lot of duplicated content and by installing vBSEO with the suggested options may decrease the indexed pages on search engines. Is there any way to avoid this only on the archive? I mean, can I leave the archive untouched and working exactly as it is today?
3. Why does vBSEO requires(or recommends) to have the forumid in thread URLs? Can I have the forum name instead?
4. If the above question is positive, can I replace a long forum title (for example "Windows Vista Discussion") with a shorter one (for example "windows-vista") to use it in the URLs?
5. I use vBadvanced to power my home page. Is there anything I should know?

I thank you in advance and really look forward for answers and/or additional information you may provide to me.

Hi Julian,

I'll see if I can answer your questions.

Originally Posted by JulianD

How to minimize any negative impact on the traffic of my forums coming from search engines just after installing vBSEO? Especially from Google. My traffic cannot dramatically drop because that will affect my income.

- The 301-redirect will automatically point visitors to the 'new location' of your pages, but there's going to be a drop in total URLs indexed regardless - the 'fluff' pages, those that are duplicate content in vanilla vB, those are removed entirely by vBSEO. What remains is the content that you want indexed.

Originally Posted by JulianD

I understand that the standard vBulletin installation generates a lot of duplicated content and by installing vBSEO with the suggested options may decrease the indexed pages on search engines. Is there any way to avoid this only on the archive? I mean, can I leave the archive untouched and working exactly as it is today?

I think you'll be fine.. I say that because I wasn't aware the Archive's content could be accessed in multiple ways.
You might be interested in reading: Why the vBulletin archive is useless and counterproductive

Originally Posted by JulianD

Why does vBSEO requires(or recommends) to have the forumid in thread URLs? Can I have the forum name instead?

Because without it, two threads with the same title will result in only one being accessible. Also, should you ever choose to remove vBSEO, you will be unable to create an automatic redirect back to the original php URL.

Originally Posted by JulianD

If the above question is positive, can I replace a long forum title (for example "Windows Vista Discussion") with a shorter one (for example "windows-vista") to use it in the URLs?

You can define specific URLs for specific forums using Forum Slugs (in config_vbseo.php)

Originally Posted by JulianD

I use vBadvanced to power my home page. Is there anything I should know?

Well, here's some rules to use to rewrite your URLs.. CRR Custom Rewrite Rules for root

Originally Posted by JulianD

I thank you in advance and really look forward for answers and/or additional information you may provide to me.

Hopefully those helped, if not, ask more!

Hi Ace!

Thanks for your promptly answers! I appreciate them so much! I have a question though:

Originally Posted by Ace Shattock

Because without it, two threads with the same title will result in only one being accessible. Also, should you ever choose to remove vBSEO, you will be unable to create an automatic redirect back to the original php URL.

But I see there is already a threadid in the URL (vbseo com/f2/question-before-installing-38701/) so two threads with the same title will never have the same URL because of the threadid. Or am I wrong?

Thank you!

Originally Posted by JulianD

Hi Ace!

Thanks for your promptly answers! I appreciate them so much! I have a question though:



But I see there is already a threadid in the URL (vbseo com/f2/question-before-installing-38701/) so two threads with the same title will never have the same URL because of the threadid. Or am I wrong?

Thank you!

The way I read your original question was "Can I have my URLs without the <variable>_id?". Whether or not other things in there *as well as the _id* is really irrelevant.. you really should have member_id in Member rewrites, thread_id in Thread rewrites etc.

You can have both thread_id and forum_name or forum_path in the rewrite. As long as thread_id is in the rewrite, no two threads will have the same URL. Remove it, and they could.

Hi Ace,

I am sorry for the misunderstanding. some times I find difficult to express myself in english.

Does your reply tells me that the only variable I need for thread rewrite is threadid?

Thanks for all your support. It has been of great help.

threadID is all that is required, but we do recoomend at least 1 other character, such as /t123/ to make sure there is no conflicts. Of course, it fully supports including the full title in the URL as well.

Thank you very much Brian.