Should I block this part of my forum?

[JPetrillo]

This section of my forum is just a separate section that posts RSS Feeds from other websites I like onto my forum using the vBulletin default RSS Feed Manager. I think this section of my forum is hurting my SEO, but I'm not sure!

Can someone just tell me if I should block this section of my forum with the robots.txt or not? I dont know what I should do...

Also - I am planning on purchasing vBSEO later tonight when I get home

Thanks!

[marco1]

Hello JPetrillo

First:This service is only for vBSEO Owners
But i will help you this time
RSS In my opinion it's not bad for your forum and members i want your site improve by your members not by RSS But if it bad for SEO I Didn't think that

[marco1]

Waw Welcome in the orange Team!

[JPetrillo]

Hello JPetrillo

First:This service is only for vBSEO Owners
But i will help you this time
RSS In my opinion it's not bad for your forum and members i want your site improve by your members not by RSS But if it bad for SEO I Didn't think that

So you basically don't know if it's bad for SEO then?

BTW: I am a vBSEO Owner now, like I said I was going to purchase it last night when I got home, which I did and already installed it too, but its not turned on yet until I get it setup the way I want.

[marco1]

So you basically don't know if it's bad for SEO then?

BTW: I am a vBSEO Owner now, like I said I was going to purchase it last night when I got home, which I did and already installed it too, but its not turned on yet until I get it setup the way I want.

No it's not bad for SEO But i didn't want you to use it in your forum because i want your members who is post the threads not the RSS Feeds
P.S : I will back to you soon with some SEO Tips

[Shadab]

After you enable vBSEO for your Forum and after Google has replaced the old dynamic URLs of your Forum with their static equivalents; you need to do some sort of testing and traffic analysis (eg. via Google Analytics) :

Check how many of those threads in the RSS Feeds forums (a total of 23 sub-forums to track) are indexed; and how many of them actually bring any traffic to your Forum. If very less RSS Feed threads are indexed, then give it a bit more time. If a substantial amount of those RSS threads are indexed, and they don't bring any traffic to you; you can safely block those sub-forums via robots.txt

Also, the AJAX Tabbed Forumhome is not SE Friendly, IMO. The bots would only see the "The Hangout" forums (which is the default selected tab) on your Forum home. Other forum categories would be one-level (click) deep for them.

[JPetrillo]

P.S : I will back to you soon with some SEO Tips

Not yet! I'm not ready yet!! I'm still doing a lot of work.

After you enable vBSEO for your Forum and after Google has replaced the old dynamic URLs of your Forum with their static equivalents; you need to do some sort of testing and traffic analysis (eg. via Google Analytics) :

Check how many of those threads in the RSS Feeds forums (a total of 23 sub-forums to track) are indexed; and how many of them actually bring any traffic to your Forum. If very less RSS Feed threads are indexed, then give it a bit more time. If a substantial amount of those RSS threads are indexed, and they don't bring any traffic to you; you can safely block those sub-forums via robots.txt

Also, the AJAX Tabbed Forumhome is not SE Friendly, IMO. The bots would only see the "The Hangout" forums (which is the default selected tab) on your Forum home. Other forum categories would be one-level (click) deep for them.

Thanks for the info... that is a great idea about using Google Analytics to track the traffic those RSS threads bring in!

Are you sure about the AJAX Tabbed Forumhome? I was told it wouldnt affect my SEO.

Check out my website using http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html see what it looks like to a spider. "The Hangout" is a link just like the others.

[Shadab]

Are you sure about the AJAX Tabbed Forumhome? I was told it wouldnt affect my SEO. Check out my website using delorie software to see what it looks like to a spider. "The Hangout" is a link just like the others.

Yes, and that's where the problem lies. The forum categories are just displayed as 'links' for the bots. Bots need to follow those links to actually see what Forums and sub-forums those categories contain. (And if you check those tab 'pages', they aren't even complete & valid xHTML documents.)

Check [this] and then [this] to see & compare what content your forumhome is missing.

[JPetrillo]

Yes, I see what you mean. Obviously the tabs affect my SEO, but by how much? is the question. See, my forums are so big that to have all of it on one page may be worse than having it split up in tabs under separate links. Do you think? Also, in my opinion it is more user friendly to use the tabs instead of viewing the entire forum on one page... because there are so many sections! What do you think? What is the risk vs. reward?

[Shadab]

You can have all the regular forumhome data in the page source for the bots to index;
and still implement tabbed Forumhome categories, without compromising anything.

Simply use a regular (non-AJAX) tabbing solution, like DOMTab (Related Post) or jQuery UI Tabs.

[JPetrillo]

Would you mind explaining the difference between AJAX and non-AJAX? I googled "AJAX" to try to figure it out myself, but I dont fully understand. Is AJAX just better because it works more smoothly or something?

[Shadab]

AJAX Scenario:

- Forumhome loads. (Without any tab 'content').
- Content of First tab is 'dynamically' loaded via AJAX.

- User clicks on another tab: Content is 'requested' and then loaded dynamically. Hence there is a very slight delay in loading as the browser needs to fetch data from your server.

- Bots cannot read JavaScript. (and hence can't process AJAX too). So all they see on your forumhome is a list of links pointing to fragmented forum category pages.


Non-AJAX Tabs Scenario:

- Forumhome loads. (With ALL your forum categories.)
- Tab 1 is visible to the user and the other 4 are just 'hidden' from view.

- User clicks on another tab: Content is immediately displayed. There is no delay in switching tabs as the data is already present in the source code of your page.

- Bots can read everything as all your content is present in the source code of your forumhome page; and we are using JavaScript just to hide/show tabs.


Hope it helps. Off to sleep now.

[JPetrillo]

Yes, thanks helps a lot! Thanks.

Is the DOMTab hard to install? Would it be a pain to remove the AJAX tabs and install the DOMTab's?

[Shadab]

Is the DOMTab hard to install? Would it be a pain to remove the AJAX tabs and install the DOMTab's?

I don't exactly how hard would it be to uninstall. Apart from importing the AJAX Tabs product from your AdminCP; did you perform any manual template edits related to it ? If not, then it's very easy to uninstall; otherwise, you'd need to undo those related template edits too.

I tried to implement DOMTab on my local instance of vB. It's not a vBulletin mod; but still it's easy to implement from my point of view. It took 1 file upload (domtab.js), 2 template edits (forumhome and forumhome_forumbit_level1_nopost) and adding CSS rules in the skin's "Additional CSS Definitions".

[JPetrillo]

Thanks man. I'm going to seriously think about switching to DOMTab's. These AJAX Tabs sometimes act weird anyways...

I search for instructions on how to install DOMTab's for vBulletin and found nothing. Do you know of any instructions anywhere? I'm not going to be able to figure it out myself without a set of instructions