[T2DMan]

When you do the mods I have suggested, you can get to the top/high reasonably easily. The issues of keyword density etc (due to VBulletin standard text) are not as high on the SEO list for getting right, as the mods I have made.

Thanks to seeing your link, I have now looked at the "vBulletin articles" hack, and also found a vbulletin surveys hack. Now to get them onto my site!

Added 28 Jan 05

Having a think about the keyword density issue for the forumdisplay's. I have not been able to get them high for their keyphrase very easily. The phrase has only been in the title/metas/firstwords, then in general not in the rest of the page.

So, I have now added the forum title just underneith each thread as listed on the page, should do wonders for keyword density, and even though it is being repeated, it is always next to unique words, so no duplicate content issues.

threadbit template - this has been a really contriversial hack. People have not liked having the forum name on the page so often. So I have got an alternative following:

after

<if condition="$show['gotonewpost"]"><strong>$thread[threadtitle]</strong><else />$thread[threadtitle]</if></a>

add

 <div class="smallfont">$foruminfo[title]</div>

OR

after

<span style="cursor:pointer" onclick="window.open('member.php?$session[sessionurl]u=$thread[postuserid]')">$thread[postusername]
			</if>

add (the if statement can be used if you don't want to show the forum title when people are logged in)

<if condition="!$show['member']">- $foruminfo[title]</if>

Poll Indicator

I have polls for all my restaurant listings, but it looks a bit crass having the word "Poll:" showing on each. The easiest way to delete this is to search phrases for "Poll:" - Global phrases containing poll - poll_thread_prefix, and change to a space.

Optimizing the Poll Display

pollresults template

amend template to include the following:
[HTML]<title>$vbphrase[view_poll_results] - $threadinfo[title] - $foruminfo[title]</title>

<meta name="keywords" content="$vbphrase[view_poll_results] $threadinfo[title] $vboptions[keywords] " />

<meta name="description" content="$vbphrase[view_poll_results] of $threadinfo[title] $foruminfo[title]. " />[/HTML]

[T2DMan]

The whole idea of SEO, is to get the max PR to a properly optimised page. Google recommends site maps, of which the "search engine friendly archive" of vbulletin is a great example. Only, that the archive then lists yet another copy of the content, and runs the big problem of duplicate content with the main threads. People are more inclined to link to the main thread, not the archived version of it, and therefore the archive version serves no useful purpose.

Archive to serve as site map

Therefore, I have changed the archive so that it links through to the main threads, rather than the said "optimised" versions.

archive/index.php file version (v 3.0.6)
previous code
[php]echo "\t<li><a href=\"" . (!SLASH_METHOD ? 'index.php?' : '') . "t-$thread[threadid].html\">$thread[title]</a>" . iif($pda, " <i>(" . construct_phrase($vbphrase['x_replies'], $thread['replycount']) . ")</i>") . "</li>\n";[/php]

hacked version
[php]echo "\t<li><a href=\"$vboptions[bburl]/showthread.php?t=$thread[threadid]\">$thread[title]</a>" . iif($pda, " <i>(" . construct_phrase($vbphrase['x_replies'], $thread['replycount']) . ")</i>") . "</li>\n";
[/php]

Pagination of Archive

There are two URL's for the first page of the archive - being one with the p-1, and one with no mention of page. Therefore, we need to change all mentions of p-1 back to thread only.

change archive/index.php

from:
[php]print_archive_page_navigation($threadinfo['replycount']+1, $vboptions['archive_postsperpage'], "t-$threadinfo[threadid]-p-");[/php]

to:
[php]print_archive_page_navigation($threadinfo['replycount']+1, $vboptions['archive_postsperpage'], "t-$threadinfo[threadid]");[/php]

and from
[php]print_archive_page_navigation($foruminfo['threadcount'], $vboptions['archive_threadsperpage'], "f-$foruminfo[forumid]-p-");[/php]

to:

[php]print_archive_page_navigation($foruminfo['threadcount'], $vboptions['archive_threadsperpage'], "f-$foruminfo[forumid]");[/php]

archive/global.php
function print_archive_page_navigation
delete
echo "<a href=\"" . (!SLASH_METHOD ? 'index.php?' : '') . "$link$i.html\">$i</a>\n";


replace with
[php]
if($i==1)
{
echo "<a href=\"" . (!SLASH_METHOD ? 'index.php?' : '') . "$link.html\">$i</a>\n";
}
else

{
echo "<a href=\"" . (!SLASH_METHOD ? 'index.php?' : '') . "$link-p-$i.html\">$i</a>\n";
}
[/php]

$vboptions[forumhome].php

There are several instances in the archive/index.php and archive/global.php files where $vboptions[forumhome].php is mentioned. I have my forum set up in the root directory, and I don't want the root page to be referred to as index.php, rather the root directory.

Therefore do a search and replace in both archive/index.php and archive/global.php for:
$vboptions[forumhome].php

replace with "" - ie blank

There should be three instances in index.php, and two in global.php

How many links per archive page?

If you analyse Google PR, you will notice that after around 80-100 links per page, that Google PR of the linked page goes from PR minus one, to PR minus two. Therefore, I keep my archive pages to now 75 links each - with the addition of the navigation links it brings it close to 100.

Therefore on the VBulletin options, search engine friendly archive, change the default 250 to 75 links per page.

Specific SEO of the archive pages [added 12 May 2005]

1. rel=nofollow/archive/global.php
Search for (v3.07)
[php]$extra = '<div class="pda"><a href="' . $pdalink . '">' . $vbphrase['pda'] . "</a></div>\n";[/php]

add rel="nofollow" so that is looks like this
[php]$extra = '<div class="pda"><a rel="nofollow" href="' . $pdalink . '">' . $vbphrase['pda'] . "</a></div>\n";[/php]

2. CSS change

add the following to the bottom of the:
/archive/archive.css file

[php]h1
{
font-family:verdana, geneva, lucida, 'lucida grande', arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
margin:0;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: bold;
display: inline;
}[/php]

3. H1 and firstwords of page

/archive/index.php file

Search for the two instances of:
[php]echo "<p class=\"largefont\">$vbphrase[view_full_version]:[/php]

replace full line of the first with:
[php]echo "<p class=\"largefont\">$vbphrase[view_full_version]:</p> <h1><a href=\"$vboptions[bburl]/\">$vboptions[bbtitle]</a></h1>
<p>".($p?"Page $p-":"")."$vboptions[bbtitle]. The site map for $vboptions[bbtitle].</p>\n";
[/php]

replace the second with:
[php]echo "<p class=\"largefont\">$vbphrase[view_full_version] :</p> <h1><a href=\"$vboptions[bburl]/forumdisplay.php?f=$foruminfo[forumid]\">$foruminfo[title]</a></h1><p>".($p?"Page $p-":"")."$foruminfo[title]. The site map for $foruminfo[title].</p>\n<hr />\n";[/php]

4. Title

/archive/index.php file

Search for:
[php]$title .= ' - ' . $threadinfo['title'];[/php]

replace with:
[php]$title =$threadinfo['title'].($p?"-Page $p":"").'-'.$title;[/php]

Search for:
[php]$title .= ' - ' . $foruminfo['title'];[/php]

replace with:
[php]$title = $foruminfo['title'].($p?"Page $p":"").'-'.$title;[/php]

5. Meta description

/archive/index.php

Search for:
[php]<meta name="description" content="<?php echo $vboptions['description']; ?>" />[/php]

replace with:
[php]<meta name="description" content="<?php echo ($p?"Page $p-":""); if($do=='index') { echo strip_tags($vboptions['description']);} else {echo strip_tags($foruminfo['description']);} ?>" />[/php]


6. Meta keywords

Search for:
[php]<meta name="keywords" content="<?php echo $vboptions['keywords']; ?>" />[/php]

replace with:
[php]<meta name="keywords" content="<?php echo $foruminfo['title']." ".$vboptions['keywords']; ?>" />[/php]

(note: when it is on the main index site map page, the foruminfo['title'] will be blank and just show the main keywords, so no need to do a specific 'if' statement to cater for the main index page)

[mickdonedee]

Hi T2DMan, I saw your articles on vBulletin.org which was timely as I have been thinking of optimizing my site as well. www.world-a-team.com

Apart from the search friendly archive vB doesn't lend itself to good optimization for search engines. I have made a start by creating a robots.txt file. I found a list of search engine bots and spiders and included them in the file and excluding all other bots. I have also added those names to the vBulletin settings to allow them to be seen in Who's Online. That means any 'Guest' must be a real person. I have also added some disallows to each user agent name. Apart from the ones you listed I have included /memberlist.php and /member.php to prevent spiders from accessing user profiles. However, today I saw a MSNBot Spider Viewing User Profile of a member called Farmer Giles. Have I not disallowed it correctly? If not, what is the correct way to disallow spiders from viewing user profiles?

[T2DMan]

Thanks for your interest mickdonedee. Please let me know any problems you have with adding the hacks, so I can make them easier if need be.

Bots accessing member profiles

Why would you want to disallow spiders from members profiles? If people are searching Google for a username, and your forum is the most optimised (due to my hacks), their username may well come to the top, and they will see your forum - sounds like the ideal to me.

I am not sure why an msnbot looked at your members profiles when you had disallowed via robots.txt

Archive

The "Search Engine friendly achive" is not that search engine friendly until you add my hacks - otherwise, it is just another copy of the thread, and it doesn't look as nice for people to see.

Robots.txt


Why would you want to disallow bots - these are the things that get our information looked at. In general, I allow everything, then exclude certain named bots. I disallow them via an htaccess file. The real nasties will not obey the robots.txt file, and htaccess is fairly fast since its at the server end/doesn't require downloading to the user etc.

.htaccess - robots exclusion

Have a look at the htaccess file attachment I use - sourced from webmasterworld - been a few months since I have updated it so there may be a few more that you want to disallow. To install it, save, upload to your live server and rename ".htaccess".

[mickdonedee]

Strange, I didn't receive an email notification for your reply. ???

Originally Posted by T2DMan

Thanks for your interest mickdonedee. Please let me know any problems you have with adding the hacks, so I can make them easier if need be.

Will do.

Originally Posted by T2DMan

Why would you want to disallow spiders from members profiles? If people are searching Google for a username, and your forum is the most optimised (due to my hacks), their username may well come to the top, and they will see your forum - sounds like the ideal to me.

I'm concerned about bots accessing members email addresses.

Originally Posted by T2DMan

I am not sure why an msnbot looked at your members profiles when you had disallowed via robots.txt

I've since removed the .php from all the disallows and it seems to have worked in blocking access to all member profiles. I've done some reading on syntax and I think /member.php would block access to that individual file only. To block access to /member.php?u=150, for example, I think the syntax must be /member. That blocks access to any path that starts with member. Anyway, it seems to work since I haven't seen any spiders accessing member profiles since I made that alteration.

Originally Posted by T2DMan

The "Search Engine friendly achive" is not that search engine friendly until you add my hacks - otherwise, it is just another copy of the thread, and it doesn't look as nice for people to see.

Thankyou, I'll look into that.

Originally Posted by T2DMan

Have a look at the htaccess file attachment I use - sourced from webmasterworld - been a few months since I have updated it so there may be a few more that you want to disallow. To install it, save, upload to your live server and rename ".htaccess".

Thankyou, I'll try that as well. I have allowed 277 search-engine spiders. I'm sure that is far more than is really necessay so I might cull that list over time. If I allow all bots access I'm concerned some baddies will get in.

Four other questions - do you think it is necessary to have a portal on my site as the home page to improve the page ranking? My current forum home has about 130 links and no real content which may penalize me.

How immediate are the results of optimising? I read that new sites aren't ranked as well as older sites. Will it take a few months for the ranking to rise?

I've noticed that some vBulletin sites with tens of thousands of members have good ranking despite a forum home that doesn't appear to be specially optimised. Do the Google spiders take into account member numbers?

I read that the word "forum" is a bad word to include in keywords of metatag. Why is that?

[T2DMan]

Originally Posted by mickdonedee

Strange, I didn't receive an email notification for your reply. ???

Can't understand why not???

Originally Posted by mickdonedee

I'm concerned about bots accessing members email addresses.

Where are the members email addresses??? - you can elect not to show them from the control panel, so no real reason to prohibit the bots from there.

Originally Posted by mickdonedee

I've since removed the .php from all the disallows and it seems to have worked in blocking access to all member profiles. I've done some reading on syntax and I think /member.php would block access to that individual file only. To block access to /member.php?u=150, for example, I think the syntax must be /member.

News to me.

robots.txt There is a wildcard nature to the Disallow directive. The standard dictates that </B>/bob</B> would disallow /bob.html and /bob/indes.html (both the file bob and files in the bob directory will not be indexed).

If I allow all bots access I'm concerned some baddies will get in.

I am more concerned that I will keep some new Goodie out.

do you think it is necessary to have a portal on my site as the home page to improve the page ranking? My current forum home has about 130 links and no real content which may penalize me.

A vast percentage of the links are links you want to get ranked high on the search engines. Yes there are some that are not so important, but I like the current front pages, as they show what is happening to the user, and you should get better numbers of people clicking through and staying with all the forums etc showing.

Of more concern is that you have not done my hacks yet - by doing the hacks, you vastly reduce the number of URL's for Google to spider, and make for generally far better PR distribution. Do the hacks, then try and prune some of the actual url's

There is a good function on the control panel where you can restrict what people who are not logged in can see. There may be some things that you could turn off, until people log in - therefore the bots who cant log in, will see less url's.

I would like to see a function where you restricted the number of url's that the bots saw.

How immediate are the results of optimising? I read that new sites aren't ranked as well as older sites. Will it take a few months for the ranking to rise?

My forum is a subdomain off an existing pr6 site - no problems at all with getting serp=1 for EACH thread within about two days of posting.

However, with your site you have not got enough PR to get spidered so often and so fast. Get lots more links in from high PR sites, and get around to doing my SEO hacks.

I just Googled a site:www.world-a-team.com and found lots of junk urls. Get rid of new ones of these being created, and you will help yourself out heaps.

You will find the same junk url's with my forum, as Google found me in the middle of an update to 3.0.2, and also with the time before I worked on the hacks. But the Google will not be finding the url's referenced any longer.

I've noticed that some vBulletin sites with tens of thousands of members have good ranking despite a forum home that doesn't appear to be specially optimised. Do the Google spiders take into account member numbers?

Its easy -

• more members mean more content
• more content = more pages to have text links back to the index page
• more content and members mean more people linking to your internal pages.
• if you do the seo right, people will link to the right pages, otherwise they will link to the wrong url for a page, and you lose out on much of the benefit of the link.

I read that the word "forum" is a bad word to include in keywords of metatag. Why is that?

Yes, forums are BAD - because they are badly optimised. If you optimise correctly and give the forum a good amount of Pr for the number of threads you have, then forums can be powerhouses

[T2DMan]

Originally Posted by mickdonedee

I've since removed the .php from all the disallows and it seems to have worked in blocking access to all member profiles. I've done some reading on syntax and I think /member.php would block access to that individual file only. To block access to /member.php?u=150, for example, I think the syntax must be /member. That blocks access to any path that starts with member. Anyway, it seems to work since I haven't seen any spiders accessing member profiles since I made that alteration.

Fascinating - I have just googled a site:forum.time2dine.co.nz and found that Google has mentioned pages that I have disallowed from Google - all be it no cache, no snippet, etc. So I will be now following your advice about the robots.txt and seeing if I can keep Google etc from listing the pages I want out of Google.

[xStylezx]

Hey,hows it goin?

I recently did some of your optimizations listed here and now ive noticed something strange.

In forumdisplay,once there are over 20 threads posted there is usually a thread pushed back onto a second page and it keeps creating pages on from there.

Well ive got 21 threads at this point and ive just noticed that there is no page 2 so that one can see the 21st thread that doesnt show on the first page of forumdisplay.This issue wasnt apparent at first as i did your optimizations around first installation of vb.

Since one forum has reached 21 threads ive become aware of it.I didnt really want to try and backout all of your optimizations so i was hoping that you could shed some light on this for me?Hopefully ive been clear enough in my explanation.Thanks for the help in advance

Edit:Im curious if i posted enough replies to a thread that with this problem a page 2 would be created or not?Maybe the problem is only in forumdisplay for me though,hmmmm.

[T2DMan]

I can see page two

http://www.non-chalant.com/forum/for...php?f=6&page=2

I can also see that there is a page one - ie you havn't yet removed the "page=1", meaning a duplicate page for page one

http://www.non-chalant.com/forum/for...php?f=6&page=1
http://www.non-chalant.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=6

Probably a caching issue on your browser?

[xStylezx]

Originally Posted by T2DMan

I can see page two

http://www.non-chalant.com/forum/for...php?f=6&page=2

I can also see that there is a page one - ie you havn't yet removed the "page=1", meaning a duplicate page for page one

http://www.non-chalant.com/forum/for...php?f=6&page=1
http://www.non-chalant.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=6

Probably a caching issue on your browser?

lol Youre not gonna believe this.For some reason the page 2 isnt showing up in Opera 7.5 for me.I just loaded up Internet explorer and it shows as supposed to.

Things have been happening like that recently for me in opera.I noticed some strange square artifacts in my header a couple days ago that werent there at all in internet explorer.A day later it was gone and it went away not long after i cleared cache in opera.Very strange to me.So i guess it was a caching issue in opera.

Now exactly how do i go about removing this duplicate page 1?Thanks alot again for your help man