Why the vBulletin archive is useless and counterproductive

Originally Posted by dutchbb

I'll post an update of the indexed pages again in three months from now.

ATM 132.000 indexed pages for forum.domain.com.

After one month is already up to 187000... didn't change anything else. I'm now fully convinced the archive is to blame.

Or you just have more threads...

Originally Posted by jbartle

Or you just have more threads...

Then why was it also higher before I enabled the archive again? It's higher when disabled and lower when enabled.

I've disabled the archive...I'm liking the results so far.

disabled, lets hope it works out your theory is right, why give more notice to older posts rather than new ones especially when vbseo is taking care of all optimizations, silly this isnt default in vb when you think about.

Archives were the pre-sitemap-sitemaps that were made necessary primarily due to the development requirement of complex URL structures in dynamic sites. As our understanding of SEO grows in the development process, this has improved over time, and technologies like AJAX are starting to allow more dynamic complexity without overloading the URLs, we are going to need these concepts much less.

Google and other search engines now supporting XML based sitemaps now make them almost completely unnecessary in most cases. But each system varies, and they could be useful in some situations, even arguably in the vBulletin system.

I prefer maximimizing crawling efficiency and focusing on the actual content-rich pages themselves, not the archive shell.

I disabled the archive now. Lets see if it causes any difference

I don't understand what you mean. How can a archive be useless when you have a database that is 20Gig in size?

My message board was hacked and it is taking me days to restore the database. If I had a archive of old posts and threads my current vbulletin database would be mean and lean and faster to restore rather than having to restore 20Gigs.

Or am I missing something?

Please advise how I can create a archive of old posts,placing them somewhere on the server for easy access for members who enjoy reading old posts.

the vb archive is NOT a true archive at all in the sense you are thinking of it. it is not a 'backup of old posts'. It's simply another url, with the same DB query reading the same db tables, pulling the same info into a simplified html template.

What you want to do is not built into vb, and frankly, i wouldn't advise it. I move 200gb databases around all the time and it only takes a few hours to restore if necessary. If it's taking you all day, you need a better server or backup NAS at your datacenter for 20gb DB's.

Once you disable the archive.Then how would you configure the settings in vbseo or leave it alone?

[How To] Completely Turn Off the vBulletin Archive

Originally Posted by Michael Biddle

[How To] Completely Turn Off the vBulletin Archive

thank you

No problem

Does this still apply?

I'll be upgrading to vB4 upon gold release & vbseo 3.5 release. Im wondering whether I should wait before doing this!

I would. I have a test board and it still has the archive.