Why the vBulletin archive is useless and counterproductive

So there are no situations where cloaking is allowed? Like say, how online newspaper publications publish a portion of thier content?

I'm sure the search engines don't punish well established newspaper publications like The New York Times or The Washington Post.

I'm a thoughtful guy aren't I? I'm just saying there has to be a reason I find lots of publications in search results. The would be big time abusers of cloaking wouldn't they?

If you publish the same content same to both guests and search engine bots you can do what ever you want

Ok, so I can "cloak" (summarize) my content on another page linking to the member's only (full article/post/thread) as long as the summarized content matches the members's only version in text up to that point?

Hm, this has nothing to do with this article so why not make a new thread?

But to answer your last question: you can read about cloaking here: Cloaking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I do not see a problem with showing a summary to logged out users. Cloaking is more like checking for the IP and then showing a completely different text version with keyword stuffing etc...

How have the stats been dutch since you removed the vb archive ?
Mine haven't changed at all, high or low.

I was thinking of doing this....but I just have vBSEO use the full version of the text atm...

I have read all the thread yet and even after some month I can't figure out if disabling archive is good or bad ? dutchbb what is going on ?

Originally Posted by Loco

How have the stats been dutch since you removed the vb archive ?
Mine haven't changed at all, high or low.

Its hard to say. The forums got a lot more traffic every month since installation of vbseo and after removing the archive the forum is still growing fast... It didn't have any negative impact I can tell you that. The site has now 613k indexed (205k forums) so I'm not complaining

Originally Posted by class101

I have read all the thread yet and even after some month I can't figure out if disabling archive is good or bad ? dutchbb what is going on ?

I wouldn't worry about it too mutch If you make sure the archive is used as a sitemap, you should be ok. I still think removing it is better, but I can't really prove it has a direct positive effect.

I think to remove it so it does too much links on every pages , one sitemap link must be enough , thanks for sharing your experience

After some days looking at the bots crawling I think its a goood idea to remove archive links and also disabling the memberlist and who's online, I see the bots are now much frequently crawling threads and tags, they were crawling previoulsy so much user profiles or archive pages, thanks for the useful hint.

Originally Posted by class101

After some days looking at the bots crawling I think its a goood idea to remove archive links and also disabling the memberlist and who's online, I see the bots are now much frequently crawling threads and tags, they were crawling previoulsy so much user profiles or archive pages, thanks for the useful hint.

Why not just use robots.txt to prevent spiders from crawling the pages you don't want them to and still let your members use the features your forum software came with? I can understand shutting down the archive, but not the member list or who's online. Matbe just set permissions to exclude guests.

Jim

no archive is not down , I mean the footer archives links wich are in the footer, the archive is still available by cliking the only one link available "Sitemap" or "Archive" but the bottom links"1,2,3,4,5 etc" are gone because they are on too much pages, sometimes small pages , then bots are following them too much.

If you are going to enable your archive, I do suggest showing the archive links to guest.
I've removed my archive like the OP, but I have links to the actual forums in the footer, viewed by guest only.

IMO interlinking your site is important in terms of on-site SEO.

Well, I removed the links in the footer and left the archive on a couple weeks ago on one of my sites. Google crawls have gone up and yesterday was the biggest day ever for Google. Related? Who knows.

Originally Posted by Loco

If you are going to enable your archive, I do suggest showing the archive links to guest.
I've removed my archive like the OP, but I have links to the actual forums in the footer, viewed by guest only.

IMO interlinking your site is important in terms of on-site SEO.

Hm yes correct I reverted to another better configuration, now I display it only to guest and I switch to "No" the useful vbulletin builtin option

Display Simple View of Threads
By default, threads in the Archive are displayed in a simple manner. Set this to no to have the real threads linked from the archive.


because it happened to me to browse thread of site in the simple archive form without caring to view the full forum outside the archivee and that's not what do we need all