Should I display archive links in footer?

hi there,

I have a quick question to see what you guys recommend. I remember from reading another post here that one of the mods recommended someone to turn off their vbulletin archive links in the footer.

You can see these links at the bottom of my website 1,2,3,4,... AMGpower.com

What do you guys think? should I leave it or remove it?

thanks

I wouldn't recommend it. In fact, I recommend disabling the entire archive.
[How To] Completely Turn Off the vBulletin Archive - vBulletin SEO Forums

I'm totally confused here.

In another thread, Juan appears to be saying that the archive is used by VBSEO to generate a sitemap, and that it shouldn't be turned off. I might be misreading something. Here's the thread:

Why the vBulletin archive is useless and counterproductive

Any clarification is appreciated. Thanks!

The archive can be rewritten to /sitemap/ and used as a text-based sitemap.

Juan and myself disagree on this concept.

While his thought process is correct, as it allows for having a link to deep pages (ie, a thread with 200 pages, the link to page 72 is not a part of the pagination navigation, but in the archive it is within 2 clicks)

I say it's not necessary as the xml sitemap has a link to every page on it anyway. All it does is land search visitors at plain sites that do not represent your community correctly and provides a duplicate url to the source for no good reason.

It is up to you to use on your own site. SEO isn't about "X is right, Y is wrong" in all, if not most, cases.

awesome, after reading your reply and the other link I have decided to remove it.

Thanks Brian.

My vote also goes to removing the archive completely

Hey Brian,

Thanks for the clarification. A little disagreement can be healthy for any organization.

Form a USER standpoint, I personally hate landing on a forum page after a search, and discovering it to be an ugly archive page.

Same here.

Thanks Brian for clarifying the point. It was little confusing at the beginning.

I work for a large company that is having some issues with archive pages being index by Google. We have millions of threads indexed and we have noticed that more and more lately have been the archive pages. If we use vbSEO would we be able to safely turn off our the archive pages and just turn on the XML sitemap generator? I am very nervous to just shut them down or change the setting in the admin cp to 302 redirect archive to original threads.
On average we have about 200,000 unique visitors a day. I really don't want to screw up our traffic.

We are running VB 3.8.2

Any advice would be most appreciated.

Hello,

The XML sitemap is completely independent from the archive. You can use vbseo to 301 the archive threads to the main thread, using only the 'forumdisplay' portion of the archive as an html-based sitemap with the ultimate link resolving to the core thread.

In time, you can then monitor traffic and hopefully see your archive be replaced in the SERPs with the real urls, and then you can make the move to disable it completely if you so desire.

Hey Brain,

Thanks for the advice. Do you think disabling the archive pages is a smart move in the long run? To me they are messy and create duplicate content. I would love to get rid of them but just want to be sure it's a smart move for SEO. One of the issues we have is our original threads display 30 posts and our archive displays 250 posts so the pages are way off from archive to original. I've thought about making them both display 30 posts, letting the search engines index the changes and then either 301 archives to original or us the rel=canonical tag on the archive pages pointing to the original.

Have you every used any of these techniques?

Thanks!

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

Hello,

The XML sitemap is completely independent from the archive. You can use vbseo to 301 the archive threads to the main thread, using only the 'forumdisplay' portion of the archive as an html-based sitemap with the ultimate link resolving to the core thread.

In time, you can then monitor traffic and hopefully see your archive be replaced in the SERPs with the real urls, and then you can make the move to disable it completely if you so desire.

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