SEO

What is the benefit of the VBSeo Archive? Does it allow Google to crawl the site better, and is there any advantage to removing/leaving it?

I was also wondering what the drawbacks are for having a mod that displays the username of all the members who had visited today. It may sounds insignificant, but is Google passing a great value on these pages since they are consistently linked (while offering no real value, as these are just the members profiles)?

I recomend disabling the archive entirely once you have vbseo. If your archive is heavily indexed, it's probably best to use it as the sitemap option where the actual thread links link to the real showthread page.
It's basically duplicate content and should be removed eventually IMO. In the Member Articles forum, there's an article on this.

the 'members in 24 hours' mod is also not good to have, especially on large boards.
Google recommends 100 as a maximum link per page value. If you have 500 people visit the site a day, plus all the forum links, you're WAY over their guideline.
Frankly, IMO, no one cares who was there today or not it's a waste of space, an extra query, and does nothing good for the site.

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I agree with Brian.

You need to transition away from the archive. vBSEO's link consensus plus the sitemap will be sufficient. However, if you do have lot of archived pages currently indexed and generating a significant portion of your revenue, it is in your best interest to make a phased transition. In order words, don't remove it entirely right off the start.

As for username links for today's visitors, this is a negative SEO factor. Don't use it, but if you must, then don't display it for guests/bots.

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I just checked my analytics, and the archive is generating less than 200 hits a day. If I disable it in the VB settings, will VBSeo begin to ignore it?

What exactly is the benefit for the archive?

I have taken your advice and disabled the 'Members who visited today'.

if it is turned off in vB, vbseo won't do anything to re-write it.

the benefit of the archive is for nonvbseo customers.... and only proves the vB itself is NOT seo'ed from the factory, as it needs secondary scripts to help it rank.