"Rewrite the vB Archive Root" feature now in vBSEO RC4

vBSEO RC4 now includes a new feature to rewrite URLs to the vB archive root.

Example: Instead of using the default vB archive URL format (see A), you can configure the URL to a more SE friendly version (see B):

(A) http://www.vbseo.com/sitemap/f-3.html

(B) http://www.vbseo.com/sitemap/f-3.html

NOTE: URL B (see above) removes 1 level of unnecessary sub-directory depth as well as the embedded reference to index.php.

If you have RC4 installed, you can configure your archive URL format. Look for it in your vBSEO control panel under the heading "Rewrite Archive Root:" in the "Archive Settings" section.

You can see it in action now in our forums - http://www.vbseo.com/sitemap/

We are really looking forward to having you all test this new feature and provide us with feedback.

NOTE: We do not recommend this feature for websites that already have their vB archives heavily indexed, without first giving the idea careful consideration (feel free to discuss your thoughts about implementing this new feature here). For those of you who choose to enable this feature, we expect that it will not only make the archive links more pleasing to the eye, but might also influence the way Google weights the content within the directory in a positive way! As always we make the feature configurable so that you can keep your settings consistent with your own SEO strategies.

Reference: This topic was originally discussed in the following thread created by acers.
http://www.vbseo.com/f4/archives-sea...timization-52/

Discuss this Announcment Here

Discuss the announcement '"Rewrite the vB Archive Root" feature now in vBSEO RC4' in this thread.

Hello,

I just downloaded again RC4 but i can´t find this option ?

@mediax:

This feature will be included in the RC4 final which will be announced shortly.

My URL www.emuenzen.de/forum/index.php has a PR of 7 .

I didn´t manage to configure vBSEO so that it points always to that homepage. Can you give me a short advise ?

ok just had this doubt for some time...
this is a good feature if your main forums are light skin based. However if you have a heavily hacked board with lots of ads(some might even have flash) and heavy skins i guess the c2c ratio in such cases my be pathetic. Won't it then make the crawling by search engines very tough indeed? Cos with archives you are serving your content to crawlers as fast as possible and with minimal side code. Now you are serving content that has lots of things extra other than the main content.

What would you prefer to see at the top of the SERPS?

• your front yard with all the flowers - your actual threads
• or your back yard - no graphics, boring archive version

Why bother with great skins if all you want is for people to see the bland archive?

With the similar threads and links from the front of the forum, plus more people likely to link to the actual thread, plus next thread/previous thread, plus last post, new post, posts by each member,... there are a great many links available for the actual threads.

You talk about the search engines moving through the archive versions easily - they will also look at the threads unless you add rel=nofollows to the threads and add them to the robots exclusions - have you done that?

Have you specifically optimized the archives with custom meta descriptions, titles, introductory paragraphs with the keyword phrases in them?

I am not so interested in the search engines being able to spider easily, rather that once the spiders see the pages, that those pages rank top for their search terms. And when users see them, they like what they see.

With all the many links going through to the threads, the formula of vBSEO tweaked vBulletin (with my SEO vBulletin hacks) plus links from Link Vault can send each thread of a forum to the top of the SERPS.

Then there is the issue of duplicate content - Google is intellegient - it can see that the real meat of the pages are the same. So it prefers to have only one version of the page.

How can I get my Search Engine Optimize vBulletin thread second on Google to the official vBulletin site - Google for "vBulletin" - the page is over 100k.

How can I get thousands of threads top of Google for competitive phrases?

So - use the archive as a site map, with links straight through to the real threads. I add to this by adding a footer link to each of the main archive pages so that I can get the maximum Google PR through to the archives, then through to the threads.

Even vBulletin has followed my advice and added the direct archive link to thread option into vB3.5.

I think the best option is only activate it for guests, since the goal of this sitemap is just spider crawling... right?

Thats up to you. SE's are guests though... so if they index both, chances are due to C2C ratio, the archive will come up first.

Originally Posted by briansol

Thats up to you. SE's are guests though... so if they index both, chances are due to C2C ratio, the archive will come up first.

So, what's the official VBSeo advise?