What can vbSEO do for vbCMS serious SEO issues?

When looking at the default vb CMS code it seems a SEO nightmare to me.
Coming from well written html pages with established websites and good content, I have seen 1st ranking websites fall back to page 8 in Google, after moving to vbulletin CMS. In this regard it was SEO suicide.

I know the CMS is constantly being worked on, and therefore I can not expect vbSEO to be the full solution for vbulletins flaws. But none the less I am interested to learn what improvements vbSEO has for the CMS.

Could anyone from the staff please explain?

Hello,

Our full feature list can be found here:
vBSEO - Feature Comparison vBSEO for vBulletin

Our product does offer a static URL for all CMS articles and sections.
Our Relevant Replacements will be available on the CMS in our next release (vBSEO 3.6) due out in a few weeks/months (still not finalized).

Ok. thanks. I'll await that announcement.

The biggest problem with vBulletin CMS is the limited layout options vBulletin offers. Currently Articles must have the same layout Sections are designed which is a huge problem because Article and Section are two different items. Users want to show as much data as possible on Sections and this messes up Articles. As a result of this Article's are polluted with tons of unnecessary data and main content is buried. That's why many sites currently have problems related CMS SE rankings. On my own vB4 website i created Section layouts as clean as possible and removed Left column all together. I also customized the templates a lot and now i have good rankings within Articles.

Relevant Replacement feature in CMS will surely help because SE's will be able to reach article content and a short article entry text easily. This will allow them to identify the content and will surely increase your rankings.

However we can't do much because of the wrong planned CMS structure.

I still haven't launched my vB4 suite and am on 3.8 but after looking at my CMS options in vB, will continue to run my main .com site from my existing static html pages once I do deploy vB4. It's unfortunate as I was looking for an all in one solution.

Could you please checkout the thread here and add your two cents:

Are there any plans to fix the vbCMS SEO suicide issue?

It is not our realm to tell what vB to do with their product. We all know that the CMS has a long way to go, but it is not our say to tell them what to do with it. We will be happy to discuss issues relating to vbseo here, but the issues within the core vb program should be brought up with the core vb developers.

Understandable. The weird thing is that they are asking customers for SEO suggestions and I dont even know where to begin.

It needs to be re-built from the framework up.

Having one template (cms_page) control everything and relying on blocks for everything makes it difficicult to set up home/category/section/article/ pages differently, and without 34234234423 extra lines of un-necessary code and db queries. They should re-write it into 4 pages, or at least 4 template bases and ditch the block concept for anything but extras like menus/sidebars/meta/etc.

Originally Posted by Mert Gökçeimam

The biggest problem with vBulletin CMS is the limited layout options vBulletin offers. Currently Articles must have the same layout Sections are designed which is a huge problem because Article and Section are two different items. Users want to show as much data as possible on Sections and this messes up Articles. As a result of this Article's are polluted with tons of unnecessary data and main content is buried. That's why many sites currently have problems related CMS SE rankings. On my own vB4 website i created Section layouts as clean as possible and removed Left column all together. I also customized the templates a lot and now i have good rankings within Articles.

Very interesting comments Mert. Could you please share your site URL so others like me can benefit from observing what you have done.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

It needs to be re-built from the framework up.

Having one template (cms_page) control everything and relying on blocks for everything makes it difficicult to set up home/category/section/article/ pages differently, and without 34234234423 extra lines of un-necessary code and db queries. They should re-write it into 4 pages, or at least 4 template bases and ditch the block concept for anything but extras like menus/sidebars/meta/etc.

Yes, that seems more logical. I'm also missing a lot of possibilities to add keyword relevant markup.

What do you think of the positioning of links and content? It seems to me that its horrible practice to place important links almost at the bottom, instead of making it one of the first things a bot reads. And CSS in the page instead of in seperate files seems to add major clutter.

I'm definitely subscribing to this thread because I'm also building my main site around the CMS and its article system. Both Brian and Mert have some excellent points regarding the vbulletin CMS and I'm really looking forward to when things improve for better SEO.

I noticed today that googlebot was looking at my cBCms Comments section. I have no comments in there but it appears there is an internal link to each particular article. What are all of your opinions... it best to leave comments on as it provides more internal site links or turn off the article comment option because its a bad thing?

The 'comments as a forum' feature is also a design flaw if you ask me. There shouldn't need to be a forum parent (display) just to be able to use the main post engine and store the comment. There is zero good reason to have a forum duplicate all the cms comments.

I would suggest robots.txt'ing out the comments forum so that it is not indexed there, but rather in the cms entry itself.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

The 'comments as a forum' feature is also a design flaw if you ask me. There shouldn't need to be a forum parent (display) just to be able to use the main post engine and store the comment. There is zero good reason to have a forum duplicate all the cms comments.

I would suggest robots.txt'ing out the comments forum so that it is not indexed there, but rather in the cms entry itself.

Thanks for the response Brian. I didn't understand either why they needed a whole 'nother forum section just for comment links. I'll take your advice and robot.txt it out.

Is this how it would look to do it correctly? Here's the disallow section of my robots.txt file (I used the base template you recommended in another thread)

User-agent: *
Disallow: *.js
Disallow: search.php
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /install/
Disallow: /customavatars/
Disallow: /vbcms-comments/

yup, that looks fine if that is in fact it's seo'ed url.