Migration to vBulletin + vbSEO, any advice?

We have just switched forum software and integrated an old forum running webbbs with another old forum running DiscusWare. The new forum runs vBulletin 3.8.1PL1, vbSEO3.3RC2 and vbSEO Sitemap Generator 2.5. You can find our new forum here:

CFD Online Discussion Forums

After one week online the new forum has had 1,500 active users and on weekdays the forum gets about 150 new posts every day. The forum contains more than 200,000 old posts, dating back more than 10 years, most of the posts have been imported from the old non-vBulletin forums. Forwarding is active from the old formus for both sub-forums, threads and posts to help people to find old posts and also hopefully help with search engine reindexing.

Looking at the Google sitemap page it shows that our sitemap currently contains 65,000 URLs and about 4,000 of these have so far been indexed. I'm not sure if this is good or bad after one week online. The vbSEO sitemap reports shows about 6,000 googlebot downloads every day for the moment, mainly of showthread.php pages. I'm not sure if this is good or bad either.

Has anyone got any suggestion on how we could improve our forums and make them more search engine friendly?

Welcome

• I think your header need (3D) Graphics , i think your forum will looks great with vBSEO Style 1 Or vBSEO Style 2 (Will release after 3.3 Gold)
• i want you to use vBSEO Relevant Replacements
• i want you to remove your forum title from your thread pages
• i want you to SEO your members profile,Albums,Tags ..... Check My Template SEO thread (Link in my Sig) Post #3
• i want you to use vBSEO Virtual HTML Display Check Out : http://www.vbseo.com/blogs/marco1/ho...-template-236/
• I want you to use Welcome Message for guests
• I would you to remove FAQ Link in your navbar for guests only (Use Conditionals)
• You disable the archive did you remove it from your sitemap ?

Thanks for your quick reply. I will go through your points of advice. I already fixed the easiest one and removed the FAQ link for visitors.

I'm not very fond of using large relevant replacements close to the title of the pages. This might help in search engine optimization, but text there is irritating for users who visit the forums often. This forum is very dependent on regular users and although SEO is important it is even more important to make the forums as nice as possible for returning visitors.

Do you think that the use of the "- forum title" in the thread titles is bad for SEO? Personally I like to see this in the title when I search for things on Google. When you for example search for something and find links to Wikipedia in Google it is nice to see the "- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" at the end of the title so that you instantly know where the link goes.

I will go through your post about SEO for member profiles, albums and tags. If I believe in it I will add it. Thanks for the hint.

I would use more virtual HTML display if the menu system would work with that, but I have not been able to get the top non-vBulletin menu section work as a virtual HTML display.

What do you mean with "Welcome Message" for guests? There is a small welcome note displayed when someone visits the forum as a guest. Do you mean something else?

Concerning your last point. I'm not sure if I removed the archive from the sitemap, how would I check if I did that? I hope that I have removed all traces of the archive functionality. I don't like it and find it very confusing when I search for things myself and end up on dead archive pages. The fact that it is also bad for SEO makes it a no-brainer to disable it. This is a big benefit with vbSEO that removing the archive with vbSEO works so well.

Re : Forum Title
this help you for long tail optimize Learn More About long tail optimize : http://www.vbseo.com/blogs/joe-ward/...long-tail-145/
Also Check Out : [How To] Remove Forum Title from Thread Pages for Long Tail Optimization / Increased Thread Title Relevancy

Re : Virtual HTML Display
It should be working

Re : Welcome Message
Welcome Message is an picture Appear only for guests Check Out : [HOW-TO] Make your Welcome Headers an image!

Re : Disabling The Archive
Admincp > Sitemap Generator Options
Also i would you to include ONLY showthreads and forumdispaly only and didn't include (showpost,archive,tags,albums....etc) I want Google to focus in your forum content (Threads)