Thanks, and a question

First, I want to thank the vBSEO team. I have been running a vBulletin forum for 4 years (after converting from another forum system), but had little success in getting Google to index it. Google spent months with only about 1,000 threads being indexed, but a week after installing vBSEO, Google had indexed an additional 4,000 threads and after two weeks almost everything had been indexed. And my forum traffic is up over 100% after two weeks.

I wish I'd known about vBSEO years ago; I'd be a lot further ahead by now! :-)

I have one question about the URL rewriting. I had Alexa do a site audit on my site, and it came back with several thousand pages with insecure meta tags ("meta name="generator" ...). This puzzled me because I had removed those tags from the headinclude template a while back. When I looked more closely at the URLs, I saw they all had the format:

http://.../forums/../...-print.html

A little more digging found the "meta name="generator" tag in the printthread template, which I have now removed.

My question is -- how did Alexa find the "...-print.html" pages? Shouldn't they be blocked somewhere? (Wouldn't they also generate a duplicate title / description error because there would also be a page without the "-print" appended?) They're not in the sitemap.

Thanks for your help.

Rex Conn
JP Software

Hello Rex ,

It is great to hear about the improvements you are seeing with vBSEO.
On every showthread page there is a print thread link within Thread Tools dropdown menu. Alexa is probably finding print link over there. But there is nothing to be worried about it.

I recommend setting the vbseo option to rewrite printthread? to No, and then add printthread.php to your robots.txt file.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

I recommend setting the vbseo option to rewrite printthread? to No, and then add printthread.php to your robots.txt file.

Hi Brian:

I already had "Disallow: /forums/printthread.php" in my robots.txt, which is one reason why I was surprised to see them show up in the site audit. I've now disabled the vbseo option as well.

Thanks for your help.

Rex