[How To] Determine How Much Traffic is From Your vBulletin Archive Pages with Google Analytics

When making decisions about whether to disable or keep enabled your vBulletin archive, the key factor is:

How much traffic are you getting to those pages?

In the ideal SEO setup you will have the archive completely removed, allowing all traffic to flow only to your high value forum pages.

The issue that arises is that many vBSEO customers already have many pages indexed before they install vBSEO.

For these users, it is important for them to determine how much traffic they are actually getting to the archive before changing the settings.

Although we know that removing the archive is the ideal setup for SEO purposes, your business may be dependent upon the existing traffic source from archive pages.

Rules of Thumb:

• If you have zero or minimal traffic to your archive, disable it completely.
• If you have a moderate amount of traffic to your archive, you may still consider removing the archive. However, you must be aware that there may be a short-term reduction in traffic.
• If you have a large amount of traffic coming to your archive pages, you should *not* immediately remove your archive pages. Doing so could result in a disruption of traffic to your forum that may take several months to recover. This may be unacceptable to your cash flow.

Note: 301 redirects will still forward any incoming archive requests to the correct location.

With Google Analytics, you have an easy way to determine how much traffic is flowing into your archive pages.

• Login to Google Analytics.
• Select "Content"
• Select "Top Content"
• A list of URLs that are generating traffic for you (in order of most traffic to least) are displayed for the selected date range.
• Scrolling to the bottom, you will see the "Find URL" filter box.
• In this box, you can enter components of URLs that will allow you to determine how much traffic you get to your archive pages.

To search for old vBulletin archive formats:

• Enter /archive/ and select "containing" from the dropdown, and then hit "Go".
• You will get a list of all pages from the old vBulletin archive that are generating traffic.
• You can immediately compare this to non-archive pages by selecting "excluding" and hitting the "Go" button again.

To search for vBSEO rewritten archive rewrite formats:

• Enter /sitemap/ and select "containing" from the dropdown, and then hit "Go".
• You will get a list of all pages from the old vBulletin archive that are generating traffic.
• You can immediately compare this to non-archive pages by selecting "excluding" and hitting the "Go" button again.

Note: If you choose a another option for rewriting your archive pages, just enter the virtual folder you selected such as /yourarchivefolder/.

The result is that you will quickly get an estimate of traffic arriving at your archive pages. This allows you to make informed decisions about how to handle your archive pages: disable or keep?

Also:

You can do the same as the above on your "Top Exit Pages" and "Top Landing Pages" to compare your "Bounce Rate" and "% Exit" rate for archive versus non-archive pages.

Very helpful article, Joe. I would also like to add that if your forum folder is not the root of your site you will need to add /forum/archive/ or /forum/sitemap/ (where forum = the name of your vb-forum) to do the searches you mention above. I first did the search with the /archive/ and had 0 results; then I added in my forum name and got less than 100 entries via the archive.

Thanks again.
Cheers,
Bruce

Interesting. It should have matched for you just with /archive/, without the /forum/ part.

/sitemap/ worked for me fine.

I got 42,317 Pageviews for /sitemap/

% of Site Total: 1.65%


Do you think its worth keeping or getting rid of for me?

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

Interesting. It should have matched for you just with /archive/, without the /forum/ part.

Nope. I guess maybe it is because of where I have my forum folder placed. sitename.com/forumfolder instead of sitename.com

Cheers,
Bruce

I've used /sitemap/

You suggest me to disable it?

Thanks

Originally Posted by hornstar6969

/sitemap/ worked for me fine.

I got 42,317 Pageviews for /sitemap/

% of Site Total: 1.65%


Do you think its worth keeping or getting rid of for me?

What is 42k page views equal approximately in revenue to your site? I.e. 1.65% of your generated income. Is is significant?

I would expect that disabling your archive over the long term is going to be a very positive move for your forum.

However, you have solid traffic, so you have to decide if you can withstand a reduction of approximately 1.65% in income for the short-term.

For me, although I am admittedly very biased against the archive, I would definitely want to get rid of it.

Originally Posted by meonet

I've used /sitemap/

You suggest me to disable it?

Thanks

That's only 38 URLs, so it should not really impact you. What %-age of your total traffic is that? Negligible?

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

What %-age of your total traffic is that? Negligible?

Where i can see it?

How i can to disable it?

Please check out this resource:
http://www.mahalo.com/How_to_use_goo..._for_beginners

Is vbseo staff on agreement with this?

It really looks like Juan has a different opinion on this topic by looking at his post on page 2 of the other thread whether the archive is useless.

Also, no vbseo staff (that i can see) has stated what the correct way of disabling this is.

I posted in the other thread, it would be good if an official way can be stated, as I dont want to miss a step that could impact my traffic even more.

Thanks.

Please see here to disable it: [How To] Completely Turn Off the vBulletin Archive

Thankyou for creating it. It is now more clear to ensure I am following the right instructions.

Lets hope my forum traffic will benefit from this in the long run!

Nov 1, 2007 - Sep 15, 2008

i have got 9,982 URLs containing "/sitemap/" were viewed a total of 899,099 times.

Pageviews
899,099
% of Site Total: 2.62%

Unique Pageviews
661,634
% of Site Total: 3.33%

Time on Pag
00:01:34
Site Avg: 00:00:37 (152.56%)

Bounce Rate
65.57%
Site Avg: 46.52% (40.96%)

% Exit
46.27%
Site Avg: 15.61% (196.34%)

$ Index
> $0.00
Site Avg: > $0.00 (43.72%)

You suggest me to disable or keep sitemap ?

Thanks,

Being under 3%, i'd kill it.