Matt Cutts says Honest site owners don't really have to worry about duplicate content

Any particular reason why?

When there aren't any non-archive/sitemap pages indexed, the only way people coming from search engines get in your site is via the archive. Therefore everyone would have to click more than once to view the actual threads or forumhome.

It's not user friendly, or normal and I strongly doubt this will enhance traffic and/or sales.

I don't believe the archive is effective for SEO and I will try to explain why I tuned it off.

http://www.mbclub.co.uk/forums/archi....php/f-17.html (had to use an eg as mine is tuned off )

Google have said many times that they do not go past circa 100 links on any one page.

The above page has 274 links on it well over Google's limits.

Now if we reduce the number of threads to display to say 99 we will get (there are 5.5k threads in the forum) 55 pages of links. So now we have 99 threads links, 54 page links and 4 others. This gives us total links of 157 links.

So lets say we only display 50 thread links per page this means we get over 100 page links at the top.

I spent some time trying to find a format I believed would work for spiders and I could not find one so I tuned the archive off.

Originally Posted by Zooman

I don't believe the archive is effective for SEO and I will try to explain why I tuned it off.

http://www.mbclub.co.uk/forums/archi....php/f-17.html (had to use an eg as mine is tuned off )

Google have said many times that they do not go past circa 100 links on any one page.

The above page has 274 links on it well over Google's limits.

Now if we reduce the number of threads to display to say 99 we will get (there are 5.5k threads in the forum) 55 pages of links. So now we have 99 threads links, 54 page links and 4 others. This gives us total links of 157 links.

So lets say we only display 50 thread links per page this means we get over 100 page links at the top.

I spent some time trying to find a format I believed would work for spiders and I could not find one so I tuned the archive off.

That is not a very valid excuse imo. You can not back up the fact that google does not spider archives and use them well in SERPs for the very fact that Google does rank archive pages high and sites are seeing enough traffic through the archives to warrant them not being turned off.

There is no way at this point in time that you could convinve me that google is hurting me for the archive because well they aren't. I make too much money through ads on the archive to warrant turning them off.

23


Less than 100 links out total


Google says limit to 100,
but readily accepts 2-3 times that number. ref 2k

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/inte...ng-factors.htm

21,300 pages indexed. This includes both showthread and the archive. No pages are marked supplemental

Another example that the archive DOES NOT hurt you in Google

rdmotorsport - Google Search

Search for the term rdmotorsport (a sponsor on my site) and take a look at the 3rd and 4th listing for it.

It lists the Archive and then underneath the archive it links to the original thread

Another example: ssinserts - Google Search

Archive pages actually help the main page by providing a content relevant internal link. I recommend leaving the archive settings well alone (vbulletin default)

Originally Posted by dutchbb

You can't do that, you have to show the same thing to users (guests) as too SE's

YOU CAN do that. It isnt cloaking... You can tell google NOT TO INDEX any page you desire and thank god that is the case.

I have never had the bollocks to ban threadview and forumdisplay pages yet.... but maybe in a future pissed moment I might give it a whirl!

I think there could be benefit that each forumdisplay and threadview page link to the archive version somehow to spread some further PR to archives.

@Rob: You mean with a robot.txt or rel="nofollow", I meant with a special SE targeted conditional in markup or php or something.

An SE targetted conditional would just be silly because rel="nofollow" is the correct way to stop SE's indexing content.

Before you mention robots.txt, stop and think about that for a moment in conjunction with content relevant URL's