SEO

vBSEO is absolutely essential, but only part of the solution.

You have to actually:

• sort out what search phrases people are looking for
• target those phrases
• and do some template changes to onpage SEO your pages.

See template changes required per Search Engine Optimize vBulletin 3.5

The difficulties that are being expressed are because the actual threads are not well optimized and are so not showing as well as the archive versions were. But get the onpage SEO right, and the threads are FAR better than the archive versions.

Patience is the most difficult part when it comes to SEO - Google is not spidering pages that fast, not picking up on sitemaps that fast, and not always retaining the cache of pages that even it has recorded PR for.

It takes time for Google to factor in all the new internal links and new url's, and then assign its version of the Google PR into the pages. It can take several months for Google to spider and factor everything in.

There is a new version of the vbseo sitemap coming out tomorrow that will help with the transition - it lists all the old url's (as well as the new) so that Google will spider the old, see the 301 redirection, and so delete the old urls from its index.

Patience, patience, patience....

Find a hole in the logic, please - there is no hole.

• vBSEO is absolutely fantastic at getting the vBulletin site SEO'ed properly - I have worked very closely with them, many in this community have helped.
• my onpage SEO template changes are fabulous at getting pages high
• BUT, you also need lots of links into your forums. Your own Google PR needs to be high meaning that Google will spider you more often, and deeper earlier, and of course get pages higher.

Be the Best you can be!!!

__________________
T2DMan
Search engine optimize vBulletin - over 55001 views
or Contract me to onpage SEO your forum - experience the additional SERP improvements

If I wanted posts to specifically rank, I would specifically SEO them - title, meta description, h1, intro paragraph. They dont have this sort of thing by default.

I would also want them to have unique interesting comment in their own right that made sense when looked at in isolation from the thread. But most posts only read well when they are looked at in conjunction with the threads.

Having the posts as live links means yet more live links on the page. Personally, I would rather have more emphasis on the threads, and get the threads top of Google, use the PR for that rather than getting the posts ranked.

Added

Okay - I decided to check the seo of this post Well I am about to make some changes.... - there is absolutely NO synergy between the title of the post, and the meta description and words on the page. It would be REALLY hard to get this post ranked in its own right on Google. So I say, why bother. It would be possible to seo the posts better, but in isolation posts are really hard to read, and they have few links into them, no links with any form of interesting link text to get the link popularity up.