[How To] Completely Turn Off the vBulletin Archive

If you were getting a lot of archive traffic, you should set it to the 301 + redirect option for a few months to point that traffic to the new source.

Thanks for the guide. All steps were fine for me except for Step 5. I'm not sure if that's not just because it's a few years old, though.

step 5 is set that was from 'the factory' and wouldn't show unless you had changed it to display them.

Okiedokie... thanks, buddy!

so what is the offical vbseo feedback on this, according to this post it should be enabled

Why the vBulletin archive is useless and counterproductive

The title of this thread is misleading. It should read "Why the vBulletin archive is useless and counterproductive and how vBSEO turns it into the perfect sitemap"

The vBulletin sitemap is not "useless and counterproductive" for people running vBSEO, and they should certainly not turn it off or modify it in any way.

For best results, vBSEO users should set their vB sitemap settings to the following:

• Archive Options > [Rewrite + 301 Redirect Archive Pages]
• Rewrite Archive Root: > [/sitemap/] or your name of preference (this really does not make a difference)
• Invert archive thread display order: > [Yes]

We don't offer any configuration officially advise on this but i personally disable Archive on every site i manage.

• Disallow: /sitemap/
• Disallow: /archive/

I'm using new version vbseo 3.0 with vb3.8.7, I can locate /archive/ but not the /sitemap/ <- where it is?

After thinking about turning off the vBulletin's html sitemap for a couple of years, I have finally decided to do it. I'm still not certain, generally speaking, if this is a good idea for everyone. However, I feel I have sufficient internal linking by the "Similar Threads" feature. Also, I feel my site is optimized a bit too much, so even if the "html sitemap" (archive) is good, a little bit of de-optimization for my site may actually be beneficial. :-)

After disabling the archive I've observed that all of the old archive URLs redirected now to the forum home. I feel a more appropriate way would be to either 404 the links or redirect them to individual threads and forums rather than leaving all of the thousands of links now pointing to the root.

What I did was to 404 them all. I used to use the /sitemap/ rewrite, and I've observed that switching vBSEO to the default /archive/index.php/ causes now my old archive URLs to return 404. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to create a 301 redirect to threads and forums, but I feel since these links were all internal (no external links), 404 may be OK.

I opted not to block the old archive URLs in my robots.txt, because I feel URLs which do not exist on my site should not exist in my robots.txt file either.

Marvin when I decided to turn off the archive , I started to monitor the incoming traffic from google analytics 1 week before I turn it off ...

there was almost no traffic cause the vbseo-sitemap is indexing the thread urls so I had no problem turning it off ...

I believe you should do the same ...

I am sure its the same about your forum

Hi Ali,

The archive has been turned off, and I will monitor my site's stats to see if I notice any negative (or positive) impact the change may have.

I suggest people who have turned off their vB archive (html sitemap) to consider letting the old URLs return 404 rather than redirect to the root. Leaving the redirect in place in effect redirects ANY URL to the root. As an example, try the following on your site:

yoursite.com/sitemap/bad-bad-bad-bad-word

The above will most likely redirect back to your forum root :-)

Yes I agree, personally I created a 404 not found page for my website.

Good, just test it well and make sure ...arena.com/sitemap/any-word doesn't redirect to your ...arena.com/community/ because at the moment it still does.

thanks for the point Marvin

Its solved now ...

Ali, now we can expect to see A LOT of 404 errors in Google Webmaster Tools :-)

But they will go away in a few months :-)

The link below is to a discussion (@ Webmaster World) of the topic of importance of sitemaps in general (both, html & xml). Members there express various opinions (pro & against), but the value of the discussion is that the members there are basing in on actual testing with number of sites (many of the members there manage large number of sites).

Possible downside of removing sitemap

Presently, on my small forum, I have no html site map, no xml site map, and not even a robots.txt. (But I wouldn't advocate such configuration for every website, as different websites may have different needs.)