Some Clarification

Hello,

I'm usually always trying to defend vBSEO on other forums I visit (you know, there's always the "all it does is re-write URLs, which we all know Google says doesn't help, bla bla bla"), so I counter their point with the fact that vBSEO does so much more.

Although vBSEO does indeed do much more, one person has pointed out that the fact that URLs are rewritten could be a "bad" thing, because Google says not to change dynamic URLs to look like static URLs.

From: vBulletin Community Forum - View Single Post - Will vbulletin 4 make vBSEO obsolete ?

They can, it's a fallacy these days that you need to change the vBulletin URL to a static looking one. The only real issue is with duplicate content pages, not the URL link itself. And in most cases a robots.txt file can solve most of that problem. Google has already said previously that your better creating another "static version" of a page for them to index, instead of altering the URL link itself of posts. As the algorithm's they use have no problem indexing dynamic URL's, and there may be parts in a Dynamic URL that their algorithm's use and are important, and should be left alone.

Originally Posted by Google

Fact: We can crawl dynamic URLs and interpret the different parameters. We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. One recommendation is to avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static. It's always advisable to use static content with static URLs as much as possible, but in cases where you decide to use dynamic content, you should give us the possibility to analyze your URL structure and not remove information by hiding parameters and making them look static.
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs

So how does one respond to this in defense of vBSEO? I hate it when people go around bashing vBSEO because they think it's useless and they choose not to use it. Personally, I think it's a great product.

It's a fact that URL Rewriting done the *right way* is going to provide large SEO advantages. Granted, Google has made it a bit confusing for those researching the topic as their webmaster guidelines have jumped around over the years, and often provide contradictory information on the same page.

The right way means establishing link consensus, a concept which no other rewrite we have encountered seems to grasp. It's simple in concept (1 URL Per Resource), yet technically very difficult to achieve in complex CMS (Content Management Systems) with a lot of content. vBulletin is a great example, with vBSEO being the only premium solution available that gets it right.

Unless you are planning on getting a proven solution to do your URL rewriting, I would also recommend sticking with the dynamic URLs and hoping for the best you can do with that setup. A badly implemented URL Rewrite setup is likely to be a waste of time and possibly even bad for your SEO.

Here is a recent case of someone writing for SEOMoz who gets it really wrong, when he emphasizes the "simplicity" of do-it-yourself SEO. He gets my personal burn-before-reading recommendation:
http://www.vbseo.com/f104/7-pages-wh...ourself-34741/

Google is simply not going to penalize you for making your site vastly more search friendly, by creating a 1 URL Per Resource setup, that eliminates noise content and duplicate content/paths, and provides a hierarchical structure to a site that previously lacked it.

Using vBSEO you can establish a sitemap where every page is a unique, high value page. You maximum your link value to every page, ensure that external links created by users are to a link value passing URL, etc. Crawling efficiency on vBSEO forums can easily exceed 95% boosts in efficiency, accelerating your time to index new content, and increasing the link value for every page on your website.

Google wants to know exactly which URL to access each page. They even introduced "canonization" tags as the duct tape solution. vBSEO is the only solution to give 100% real 1-URL-Per-Resource (link consensus) setup.

Robots.txt is simply too limited. It's Allow Disallow capabilities is actually more effective with vBSEO since sub-forums are actually given hierarchical structure, but it (alone) does nothing to help achieve link consensus.

Google wants to crawl every *unique* page on your site. Googlebot has no desire to crawl thousands or even millions of extra pages... wasting it's time and delaying your new content from ranking. Yet this is exactly what happens without vBSEO.

The user you quoted is misinformed, but that is not a critique. It's an very complex topic, and we do not expect every user to spend time drilling down into the intricacies of advanced URL rewriting for forums.

Remember, search is broken down into the categories of crawling/indexing/ranking. We focus on each of these categories when we engineered the URL rewriting structure you get with vBSEO.

If you're not using vBSEO, then I would agree that you should stick with your dynamic URLs and hope for the best. If you're serious about maxing out your SEO, then vBulletin admins have the special advantage of having vBSEO available to them.

Forget about plain old vanilla URL Rewriting. That's not the answer. Full link consensus that maximizes link value, creates informational hierarchy, boosts crawling efficiency, and accelerates indexing, ranking, and traffic generation for new content is what you need. vBSEO includes all of this in the our premium solution.