For better Search engine rankings

1. .htaccess in your root:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]



2. By default, vBulletin will store the CSS of your pages as HTML within the head of the document. This, when taken over thousands of pages, can be quite a heavy burden.


Storing CSS Stylesheets as files will allow users/spiders to cache the CSS as a file, and make each page smaller, HTML wise, giving your server a bit of a breather.

To begin, ensure your forums/clientscript/vbulletin_css directory is chmod 777 so the stylesheet files can be created.
Next, in the AdminCP, select the vBulletin Options menu then vBulletin Options.
Select Style and Language Options.
Set "Store CSS Stylesheets as Files?" to Yes.
Click Submit.

3. For individual thread pages, your HTML title tag should be ONLY the title of the thread. Most people agree that the HTML title tag is one of the most important basic SEO aspects. Forum software typically uses: "Title-of-board -- title-of-thread" as the HTML title. Pare it down to just "title-of-thread". Not only does this help with targeting your page towards the most relevant keyword or keyphrase for the thread, but it helps with the "semantic" SEO aspect. When searchers see their search term as the title of your page in the SERPS, they're more likely to click on it than a page title with extraneous information.



Remove $vbphrase[x_powered_by_vbulletin] and $vboptions[bbtitle] in Templates FORUMHOME, FORUMDISPLAY, SHOWTHREAD, MEMBERINFO, SHOWTHREAD_SHOWPOST


4. Really consider losing your signatures to guests (and as such SE) as they are killing the content flow and the same keywords are being repeated to often and may be considered SPAM (google will not return spam in the SREPS) you will also see a drop in bandwidth and page size all very very good for hosting and SEO.

What this will do is make it so only registered members of your forum can see signatures - so visitors and search engine bots wont see them. In the postbit/postbit_legacy template find:

PHP Code:

 <if condition="$post['signature']"> 


change it too:

PHP Code:

 <if condition="$post['signature'] AND $bbuserinfo[userid] != 0"> 


5. - Message Posting and Editing Options > Automatically Quote Post / Thread Title > yes

- Message Searching Options > Automatic Similar Thread Search > yes

- Forum Display Options (forumdisplay) > Enable Forum Description > yes
(( I don't use this on vbseo sites, it has its own dynamic feature like this ))


Edit template: showthread_similarthreads

Look for:

Code:

$vbphrase[similar_threads]

Replace with:

Code:

$vbphrase[similar_threads] for: $thread[title]

6. I personally prefer NOT having "Who's online" available to guests. Despite it basically looking messy - I don't think it helps for SEO purposes with all those extra links to member profile pages after all you do not want bots wasting time and bandwidth on fluff pages they may index the member pages but they will never return them in the SERPS (search engine result pages).


7. Lose Forum Jump huge amount of code and no one uses it.
Admin CP > VB options > General Settings > Use Forum Jump Menu. No.


8. Rename Archive to Site Map (Google looks for Site Maps not Archives) then go to Admin CP > VB options > Search Engine Friendly Archive > Display Simple View of Threads. NO.



9. Changing the navbits to an h1

change the navbits so that the current breadcrumb is in <h1>.

Style Manager/Main CSS - add to the "Additional CSS definitions"

Code:

.h1navbar
{
 font-family:verdana, geneva, lucida, 'lucida grande', arial, helvetica, sans-serif;  
 margin:0;
 font-size: 14px;
 font-weight: bold;    
 display: inline;
}

Add the following as well for the firstwords:

Code:

.navbar2 
{ 
font-family:verdana, geneva, lucida, 'lucida grande', arial, helvetica, sans-serif; margin-bottom:5pt; margin-top:5px; font-size:8pt;
 
 }

Edit the navbar template

replace:

Code:

<strong>$navbits[lastelement]</strong>

with:

Code:

<h1 class="h1navbar">$navbits[lastelement]</h1>

and replace:

Code:

<strong>$vboptions[bbtitle]</strong>

with:

Code:

<h1 class="h1navbar">$vboptions[bbtitle]</h1>

Not bad at all. Thanks!

..

is this:

1. .htaccess in your root:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond &#37;{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

going to increase my server load? i don't know much about htaccess what is this going to do? thanks!

Hello Sean,

that will have nearly zero impact on your performance.

I'm also curious as to what it will accomplish, i think the more i know about this SEO stuff the better..

That will consolidate your links to a single domain to avoid duplicate content (domain.com/page.html and www.domain.com/page.html)

Originally Posted by Majora

1. .htaccess in your root:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain.\com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Hi, could you tell me... do i need to replace yourdomain.com with my website's name?

yes, you do.

GREAT information here. Thank you!

I am sorry guys, I am just a little bit confused. The htaccess code that I got with vBSEO shows the following:

Code:

# Some servers require the Rewritebase directive to be
# enabled (remove '#' at the beginning to activate)
# Please note: when enabled, you must include the path
# to your root vBulletin folder (i.e. RewriteBase /forums)
#RewriteBase /
 
#RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.yourdomain.com
#RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/forums/$1 [L,R=301]

My website address is myWebsite, and the forum is in the root directory. So, in order for me to code it correctly it would have to be like this???:

Code:

# Some servers require the Rewritebase directive to be
# enabled (remove '#' at the beginning to activate)
# Please note: when enabled, you must include the path
# to your root vB folder (i.e. RewriteBase /forums)
RewriteBase /
 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.my\.web.st
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.my.web.st/$1 [L,R=301]

Could you guys look over the new-code-to-be and tell me if everything in there is correct?

that looks good to me.

Actually it is supposed to be like this:

RewriteCond &#37;{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Ok, I really confused now The code below has a DASH before every period in the address. So, what if my address is wwwDOTmyDOTwebDOTst? Does this mean that that I have to put a DASH before each DOT, or do I code it like so: wwwDASHDOTmyDASHDOTwebDOTst?

I am sorry for writing it out, but the post keep turning things around and removing dashes.

#RewriteBase /
#RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.com
#RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/forums/$1 [L,R=301]

Yes, you should add slash characters before dots in RewriteCond line.

Spasibo! (Thanks)