[fyjpm]

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=24630

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I've found that mod_rewrite for vBulletin is a complete waste of time. vBulletin forums get spiderwed/indexed just fine without mod_rewrite. If you're bored and want to kill some time go for it...but it's not really needed.

What do you guys think about this?

[T2DMan]

I totally support the vbseo.com url rewrite hack - please pm me for details. It is available on the vbseo.com site, or you can have my personal touch and pay me direct (I pass on to vbseo less my cut).

With vBulletin, it is not a matter of whether it is able to be spidered and how many pages that Google has of the website in its system, its more a matter of how high those pages are on the SERP's!!!

If you have 5 url's with the same content on them, thats 1/5th of the weight possible that is going into each page. I prefer to have one url per page of content, and get that page to the top of Google. Far more efficient use of resources. Digitalpoint and others are only able to get pages high on Google because of their superior Google PR. The high PR makes up for the bad SEO of the vBulletin package.

However, vBulletin have improved. I managed to convince vBulletin to have better default titles, meta descriptions, ability to have the archive go through directly to the threads, for them to use 301 rather than 302 redirects, and for them to use rel=nofollows. See all these things in the new vBulletin 3.5 package.

However, there are still many aspects that they did not follow of my seo hacks. So there still are many duplicate pages in standard vBulletin installations.

My original vBulletin seo hack did not do any rewrites. I was able to get to the top for many competitive search terms with the basic strategies.

All the url rewrite hacks that I had seen until then were what I call far less than half done. And in my opinion they were potentially more damaging than if they had not been done at all. They introduced yet another url for the page.

Then along came vbseo - the first seo rewrite hack that was properly done. And more than that, a hack that requried only one php change, since it was a program that ran alongside vBulletin and rewrite on the fly, all the url's on an html page before it outputed the page to the user.

With vBSEO, it has made redundent virtually all my SEO php hacks and so is that much easier and riskfree to install than having to manually hack the php and templates.

What do rewritten urls provide??? In themselves, they are so much more clickable for the user. Very relevant url's help get clicks. And then you have Google seeing the keywords in the url's and giving you that bit more boost.

My sites have not increased in the serps measurably as a result of the vBSEO package, since I was already doing everything right. However, the url's are that much more clickable, and for other clients, so much easier to install.

What would you rather click on when looking in the serps:
forum.time2dine.co.nz/wellington-restaurants/
or
forum.time2dine.co.nz/forumdisplay.php?f=8

[SaN-DeeP]

What would you rather click on when looking in the serps:
forum.time2dine.co.nz/wellington-restaurants/
or
forum.time2dine.co.nz/forumdisplay.php?f=8

this definetly helps, results are visible perfect for one of my sites using vbseo..