music site

I'd much prefer to just submit threads and forums as you do, agree I'm wasting spiders time with useless content, as yes I get next to no traffic from the other parts. I'll sort that by blocking spider access to these sections such as tags.

Go to AdminCP > vBSEO > vBSEO Sitemap Settings, and disable the submitting of the undesirable URLs there.

btw what is 'Album URL's' ???

It's the URLs of photo albums some of your members might have created. They are accessible via the member's profile page. You have blocked guest access to member profiles, so guests and robots no longer have access to not just the profile pages but also the albums. The logical step now is to disable the submitting of Album URLs via your sitemap. Again, do this by changing the relevant settings in AdminCP > vBSEO > vBSEO Sitemap Settings.

Regarding Tags I'll be disabling this also and blocking spiders to this.

Are you planning on keeping the tags so your members can use them? Or do you wish to disable the tags completely? If you wish to disable the feature completely, than you can do it via AdminCP.

But the archive urls re-direct has confused me, I'm not sure why this is happening but it must of been something that was setup years ago, but how can I know that removing this redirect won't harm my google listings, or is it fine. What's the best way to do this ?

Replacing the incorrect URLs with correct ones is not going to harm anything. Each redirect carries with itself a small loss of PageRank, so correcting this small issue may help at least in a small way.

This should be possible to do by changing relevant settings in vBSEO CP and/or AdminCP. If you don't figure it out on your own, let us know, and I'm sure someone will help here, or I can try to look it up in vBSEO CP and/or Admin CP

In g anaylics I can see very few pages are archive ones, but then again all the pages in achive re-directed so I guess they won't show up here anyway. I've heard people say it's good to get rid of the achive and close it down when you can, which I'm happy to do as long as I don't hard things from G's point of view. Please advise.

I've read suggestions, here on this forum, to remove vBulletin Archive. Also, I've heard people say they like to keep both, XML AND html, sitemaps. I've "agonized" over it, too, and eventually I decided I didn't mind to have that one small "archive" link in the footer.

I love all the information about caching/gzipping etc. Your site is certainly rather fast! Well done.

Originally Posted by Marvin Hlavac

I've done a quick search for site:www.ukmusic.com/forum/members/

The search returned over 80,000 pages of member profiles from your site. That's 80,000 pages of content that has very little to do with the topic of your site. I'd block guest access to member profiles. That will block spiders/bots access to those pages, too. I bet they spend a lot of their valuable time crawling these irrelevant pages. Instead, they could spend your crawling budget crawling threads.

If there is going to be any link going to a page type ie http://www.ukmusic.com/forum/members/dc.html "you do not have permission to access this page", then that link is being wasted for SEO purposes. That page will be getting PR attributed to it, but the page is then totally duplicate.

Each post on a thread links to the author, the homepage has links to authors... and therefore lots of PR wasted.

If you are wanting to make best use of the no members for guests concept, then you need to put conditionals on all links to members so that the links do not appear at all for guests.

Use of "Nofollow"
- Print thread pages
I note that the print pages have a robots noindex,follow tag. Great - this is certainly my preferred way of treating such pages. But there are nofollow links to the pages from every thread - nofollow links are wasted PR. Therefore I would remove the nofollow from such links allowing the otherwise wasted PR to be attributed to the print pages which are then correctly not indexed but have pr flow through to the pages that they themselves link to (homepage and its threads page).

- check all nofollows
It is better to not use nofollow and instead have the robots noindex,follow meta tag on the page. I note that the contact us page has nofollowed links to it, but does not have the robots tag.

Homepage SEO
I note that your site has been geotargeted to USA. Why? I understand that you want a USA audience and that targeting to USA will allow that, but what about your primary audience of the UK? You are missing out on potential rankings for your primary audience.

Are you getting rankings and search engine traffic from the USA? What is your split between USA and UK from the search engines? My guess is that even if you got rankings on google.com from USA, that people would not be as likely to go to a ukmusic site since they are USA??? Answering these questions would help you decide whether you would be better geotargeting the UK where people from the UK would want to go to a ukmusic domain name?

Overall SEO of pages / Linking strategy
You need to check for duplicate content issues
ie 224 copies of your Pop Music page meta description/opening paragraph.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22...McFly%22&pws=0
- you can make all your content unique again (first instance of search phrase on page) just by changing the formula of the metas and opening paragraphs

1. Have you identified the top search phrases for the UK Music industry?
2. What are your rankings for those phrases?
3. Is your homepage specifically targeting those phrases that can fit within the 70 characters of your homepage title?
4. Are there other related phrases that the homepage can rank for?
5. What trafficked search phrases are being targeted for forum and threads?
6. Is the content for those pages unique?
7. Have you got a linking strategy to get those pages ranked higher?

Getting the user experience right once people visit the site (ie speed) is essential and it sure helps with bandwidth and server utilisation. But you also need to be thinking specifically about rankings to further improve traffic.

Exceeded number of pages I can view
I hope the spiders don't get such a message? - there are many sites that show the spiders such a message, but it looks like you allow the spiders to view everything. Sweet.

But since I can't be bothered logging in and I have used up today's allocation of free advice...
Have a great day Doug

All excellent advice, T2DMan!

I also came across the message "Exceeded number of pages viewable without registering". This is something Doug may reconsider. There may be many people who would love to become regular readers of your forum, but may not be interested in posting. Just like there are many more readers of newspapers than there are writers/contributors.

Originally Posted by Marvin Hlavac

I see you're using the thread tagging system, and I think you are even using some add-on which automatically generates tags based on content keywords.

Removed. I've done the research on tags, seems pretty useless for google. I've also removed from VBSEO Sitemap settings. I've also upgraded VBSEO Sitemap to latest version 3.

Originally Posted by Marvin Hlavac

You have already disabled guest access to member profiles, so do disable member profiles in sitemap, too.I'd disable the submitting of URLs of Poll Results, Albums, (and perhaps even Social Groups, too), because that's a lot of URLs which unlikely show up high in search results for relevant keywords, and are unlikely to bring substantial percentage of visitor traffic from search engines no matter how much you promote those URLs.

All Done

Originally Posted by T2DMan

If there is going to be any link going to a page type ie UK Music Forum Gigs and Tours "you do not have permission to access this page", then that link is being wasted for SEO purposes. That page will be getting PR attributed to it, but the page is then totally duplicate.


Each post on a thread links to the author, the homepage has links to authors... and therefore lots of PR wasted.


If you are wanting to make best use of the no members for guests concept, then you need to put conditionals on all links to members so that the links do not appear at all for guests.

How do you do this ? At the moment I changed all links on the site to nofollow from the vb backend, as I was getting spammed really hard. Since then I've put some things in place to prevent spammers, link minimum post code to post links etc, but not sure how I would block links to members for guests completly - custom hack ?

Originally Posted by T2DMan

Use of "Nofollow"
- Print thread pages
I note that the print pages have a robots noindex,follow tag. Great - this is certainly my preferred way of treating such pages. But there are nofollow links to the pages from every thread - nofollow links are wasted PR. Therefore I would remove the nofollow from such links allowing the otherwise wasted PR to be attributed to the print pages which are then correctly not indexed but have pr flow through to the pages that they themselves link to (homepage and its threads page).


- check all nofollows
It is better to not use nofollow and instead have the robots noindex,follow meta tag on the page. I note that the contact us page has nofollowed links to it, but does not have the robots tag.

How can this be done, as far as I can see I only have the option to make all links either follow or no-follow in the backend. Can you point me in the right direction please

Originally Posted by T2DMan

Homepage SEO
I note that your site has been geotargeted to USA. Why? I understand that you want a USA audience and that targeting to USA will allow that, but what about your primary audience of the UK? You are missing out on potential rankings for your primary audience.


Are you getting rankings and search engine traffic from the USA? What is your split between USA and UK from the search engines? My guess is that even if you got rankings on google.com from USA, that people would not be as likely to go to a ukmusic site since they are USA??? Answering these questions would help you decide whether you would be better geotargeting the UK where people from the UK would want to go to a ukmusic domain name?

Most of my traffic is from the UK, so I've changed this back to UK in google webmasters tools. I did change it in the past to USA as I thought I've already got alot of UK traffic and wanted to get more american traffic, but I think it makes sense for this to be set to UK. Thanks.

Originally Posted by T2DMan

Overall SEO of pages / Linking strategy
You need to check for duplicate content issues
ie 224 copies of your Pop Music page meta description/opening paragraph.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q="Everything+in+Pop+Music+from+Girls+Aloud +to+McFly"&pws=0
- you can make all your content unique again (first instance of search phrase on page) just by changing the formula of the metas and opening paragraphs

I've just recently changed the replacement varibles in vbseo backend, will this solve this duplicating issue ? I'll post an image of my settings in the next post.

as the image doesn't show all the text here it is :

on forumdisplay pages (and) FIELD

<h1 class="relevant_replacement">[forum_title]</h1><p class="relevant_replacement">Below you will find a list of discussions in the <b>[forum_title]</b> forums at the [bb_title]. The [forum_title] forum [forum_description]</p>

on showthread pages.

<h1 class="relevant_replacement">[thread_title]</h1><p class="relevant_replacement">This is a discussion on <em>[thread_title]</em> within the <b>[forum_title]</b> forums, part of the [parent_forum_title] category; [first_post_20_words]...</p>

Originally Posted by Marvin Hlavac

By the way, I've noticed your thread URLs in your Archive go via a redirect, for example, in your Archive I see the following URL:
1st Blood - Damnfiner
is being redirected to:
1st Blood - Damnfiner
My archive's URLs are not subject to such redirect. I think this can be corrected via vBSEO Control Panel and/or Admin CP.

Marvin thanks for highlighting this ! I think you've found something very interesting. First of all here is a screen shot of my vbseo settings

Attachment 8820

So I need to need to change this, but to what ?

when I search in google for site:UK Music Forum Gigs and Tours here is 1000 results.

So when I go into my google webmasters tools I see alot of errors in the sitemap area . Screenshot :

Attachment 8821

and the next page :

Attachment 8822

does this mean what I think it means, that all these redirects are preventing threads from being submitted.

Doug, congrats on all the changes you have implemented on your site thus far. If you use Google Webmaster Tools, shortly you will see errors reported for thousands of your URLs. Ignore that. That's just Google not being able to now find all the pages you have removed. Google will keep on trying to crawl the removed URLs for many months (years), but the frequency will decrease, especially if you remove (or hide from guests) any remaining links on your site pointed to the removed (or hidden from guests) URLs.

How do you do this ? At the moment I changed all links on the site to nofollow

Perhaps the "nofollow" attribute still has some use today, but it no longer has the value it once had for "PageRank Sculpting". Now, the only way to preserve PR is by completely removing unnecessary links from the page.

not sure how I would block links to members for guests completely - custom hack ?

This can be accomplished by editing templates. Find the link you wish to block from the view of guests, and add the code below marked in red color:


<if condition="$show['member']"><a href="link_to_profile"></if>member_name<if condition="$show['member']"></a></if>


The above is just for illustration purposes. Basically, find links on your site (in your templates) which you think your guests don't need to have access to, and then wrap them in the <if condition="$show['member']"> and </if>.

It may seem like a lot of work, but it doesn't need to be done over night, and you can just take it one step at a time. You may start from SHOWTHREAD pages. Look at every single link, and ask yourself if the link is really needed for guests. If it's not needed, find it in your templates, and use the above conditional statement to show the link only to your members.

Marvin, some lovely news my google pr just jumped up from 3 to 5 yesteday , NICE.

I'm looking into the do-follow issues thanks for the tips.

Question, how can I change just the page title on this page

Urban Music

At the moment it's just 'Urban Music' which according to WebsiteAuditor isn't good, it should be about 6 words. Ideally I'd like to make it something like 'Urban Music Chat Rooms Forum'

or if it had to be dynamic, sometime like

[forum_title] chat forums

I'm looking at the RR's in VBSEO but can't work out how to do it.

never mind I found the hack to do this here : Forum Title - vBulletin.org Forum

Doug, congrats on the PR3 to PR5 jump! That's very nice, and I bet it has made your day!

I'm not sure why a two-word title should be bad. But hey, feel free to experiment in that area.

Keep us posted on the changes you make.