Why the vBulletin archive is useless and counterproductive

I don't use the archive either, personally if your forum is search engine friendly then why split your pagerank up between archives and main pages? I'd rather have all the link power to 1 place, so that one place can rank better. Hmm... would you rather rank #3 and #4 for a search term or just #1? That's kindof how I look at it. With similar threads and SEF pages... you should have NO problem getting everything indexed without a physical sitemap.

Agreed. On the Mustang site I have it set to redirect and on the music site I have it completely removed and robots.txt'd out. Both sites do real well in search engines.

So it's been a few months, what do the results say?

i want to know too

its look like he's been very busy

Posted an update on page 3 It didn't do anything spectacular so maybe I'll add the archive again and see what happens then. It's difficult to analyse traffic as it takes a long time and other factors have to be taken into account when looking at the results.

For example in June the server crashed for a week and it has been a slow recovery since then, also the Google pagerank correction this year did have a major influence. I'll keep you all updated though.

My mind actually, I do not have enough page indexed page in Google, 5000/15000 are indexed and I suspect my actual archive setting to have a big impact on this. I'm setup like vbseo.com yet and when I check vbseo.com indexed pages, there is not a lot, 26,200 pages are indexed, I have read a few threads talking about vbulletin thread pages not being indexed and they refers to the vb archive which displays threads in a simple form that are much accessible to spiders and so on, much indexed threads, I turned back my configuration to have archive links for guest in the footer and disabled the vbseo rewrite in the archive to avoid the redirect to the full thread and instead I hope to have much indexed threads in a simple form.

This would not be a scenario I would advise. This creates duplicate content, and may also cause users to arrive on a non-optimal page when they find archive thread page copies in the search engines.

With time your front end thread pages should rank fine.

However, with all the work webmasters put into landing page optimization, site design/aesthetics, placing a clear goal converter on every page, etc, this is all lost on a plain, duplicate archive page.

problem is that I have 2 sections with RSS posts from the nvd database and milw0rm but most of this thread are not listed at all , nor what is listed is the archive page displaying the thread names only so I prefer to have at least thread indexed than nothing at all ^^ I dunno why Google tend to refuse indexing lost of thread pages and this not only for my forum but in general , I think theses pages has too much links.

What is the current vbseo word on this?

disable the archive/sitemap?
disallow it in robots?

Any up to date into from vbseo staff would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Im getting crawlling problem from google bot about archive in vbulletin.Now I have removed archive and I have edited my robots.txt Everything is alrgiht now.Google bot loves my site

Originally Posted by Powerofdreams

Im getting crawlling problem from google bot about archive in vbulletin.Now I have removed archive and I have edited my robots.txt Everything is alrgiht now.Google bot loves my site

For much greater SEO improvement you should consider vBSEO as your option of choice.

Also - if you are not already running our sitemap, you should do so. However, I would recommend waiting until you first install vBSEO if that is a part of your current or short-term future plans.

google is ALWAYS at my site, im hardly ever alone. lol, i should make him an account and talk to it....

Originally Posted by seangworld

google is ALWAYS at my site, im hardly ever alone. lol, i should make him an account and talk to it....

We have heard reports that several customers do pray to Googlebot.

I've been praying to the Mighty Googlebot, and so far he is responding well.

Currently, i've got my archive rewritten as /sitemap/, and the threads being redirected into the actual forum when they are clicked in the archives. Is this the recommended way, or should I completely disable the archive in the AdminCP?

Originally Posted by FightRice

Currently, i've got my archive rewritten as /sitemap/, and the threads being redirected into the actual forum when they are clicked in the archives. Is this the recommended way, or should I completely disable the archive in the AdminCP?

There is no definite verdict, AFAICT both are ok. Myself I'm not using the archive or sitemap option because I believe it has no purpose. But I would not recommend disabling it because I can't say it will help. I need to do further testing this year to be sure what impact it has.