Why the vBulletin archive is useless and counterproductive

Hey peeps, hope someone is around to help answer these questions I am about to ask..

...um, I am just not sure how to get the search engine friendly archive to work on a WINDOWS server or if I should even bother with it..I want to try though I think to get it working but..do I need a plugin or something? I clicked yes and it didn't work :(

I am new to vBulletin as I have just switched over from SMF which was nice for open source, but the search engine rankings 100% stunk, and so I was hoping for better results with vBulletin.

I used phpBB2 before SMF and it seemed to be very search engine friendly as every second of the day, almost, the Google and yahoo bots (and even MSN) were crawling my pages.

Anyone know how vBulletin compares to these two forums search engine friendly wise?

And if someone could help me get the archive thing to work, that would be awesome too,

thanks and have a great day!

vBulletin has the major advantage over others in that vBSEO is available to handle the SEO. I would advise you to install vBSEO, and then stick with your choice of platform for the long term while focusing on building great content, increasing link value, and other marketing aspects.

OK, um..not really thinking too hard today, but where do I get vbSEO from?

Sorry if that's a stupid question..it's a lazy Sunday for me today and my mind is hazy from too much Sunday coffee :P

Originally Posted by goitalone

OK, um..not really thinking too hard today, but where do I get vbSEO from?

Sorry if that's a stupid question..it's a lazy Sunday for me today and my mind is hazy from too much Sunday coffee :P

here. you're on the forums for the vbseo plugin for vbulletin. maybe you should switch to caffinated.

Yeah, yer probably right :P... I had a feeling it was here someplace, I guess I was just to0 lazy to look for it, sorry, I'll find the download link lol..thanks!

Oh Lord, it's not free either? :(

NM then....

after alot of search i think to remove archive links from footer and remove them from sitemap too.
my reasons:
first: Yahoo spiders love archive pages so, it take a long time to index your real threads and you lose most of your spiders times in indexing archive.
sec: alot of links on pages; in google webmasters documents mentioned that have pages with less than 100 links, so with archive footer link you have more than 100 links and you may loss in this way.

i realy optimized my site for spiders, and wanna use all of bots abilities for better indexing.

after these changes ,now yahoo spider indexing threads better, but i losed about 8000 page in google (i change my members profile urls too so it's effect google index count)

Originally Posted by AliMH

after alot of search i think to remove archive links from footer and remove them from sitemap too.
my reasons:
first: Yahoo spiders love archive pages so, it take a long time to index your real threads and you lose most of your spiders times in indexing archive.
sec: alot of links on pages; in google webmasters documents mentioned that have pages with less than 100 links, so with archive footer link you have more than 100 links and you may loss in this way.

i realy optimized my site for spiders, and wanna use all of bots abilities for better indexing.

after these changes ,now yahoo spider indexing threads better, but i losed about 8000 page in google (i change my members profile urls too so it's effect google index count)

I'm sorry, not sure if english isn't your first language or what but I barely understood most of that. So...did you enable or disable your archive?

Originally Posted by goitalone

Oh Lord, it's not free either? :(

NM then....

No, these people don't work for free, do you? Anyway, it's worth it 100% because you earn it back 100 times with the traffic you'll get.

So what is better?

1. No archive at all
2. Use /archive/
3. Use /sitemap/ and change the archive link name from Archive to Site Map as vBSEO.com have done

I have been using /archive/ since the day I installed vBSEO.

As for the archive footer links I completely disabled them. They look messy. Since disabling them my traffic visits have increased also.

havent changed the archive yet though...what yas think

I changed it back to like how vbseo has it but used the name archive because I have made my own sitemap. IMO this works best, my indexed pages have gone up since from 314k to 360k (for the forum).

Originally Posted by Chris Powell

So what is better?

Keep your current settings. vBSEO modifies your archive to link directly to your threads providing a second path to your deeper content. There's nothing wrong with that.

In addition vBSEO 3.1.0+ will revert your archive listings to show your most recent content first, providing this critical content more exposure.

Again, in your case, the best option is:

2. Use /archive/

Ok guys thanks for the info. I'll stick with the current settings then.

cheers chris

i have been running the following for about 18 months:

archive disabled in vb options
/archive/ folder removed entirely from my server.
vbseo setting left default to 'leave vb archive as stock' (doesn't do anything anyway)

84% of my daily traffic is from search engines, and of that 84%, 80% is google searches.

Now, my site isn't some tiny board where 10 hits = 80% either.
i have 45,000 members and 1.1 million posts....

proof? analytics screen shots attached.

toss the archive.

My ideal setup would also include complete removal of the archive.