Optimizing Forum!!

[abidsultan]

hi,

while optimizing a forum which factors are to be considered more as compare to any website or (root)

what should be dont and what shouldent be?
(urls at forum are definitely dynamic, so keep into account this too).

regards,
Abid Sultan
<mod edit: no sigs in body of post>

[vistadivine.com]

The most important thing is to make the URLs static buy vbSEO for this.

[abidsultan]

Originally Posted by vistadivine.com

The most important thing is to make the URLs static buy vbSEO for this.

yes! what else should be....
or else everything goes same like optimizing anyother site...?

[vistadivine.com]

well forums aren't that easy to optimize what more you can do is that you can use your targetted keywords in your sites descriptions and titles.

[abidsultan]

what about the multiple urls pointing to same thread, session id's...
they can be counted as spam or not or is there any doubt that it may be something spammy ?

[vistadivine.com]

No not at all, it doesn't matter.

[Cricket]

Originally Posted by abidsultan

what about the multiple urls pointing to same thread, session id's... they can be counted as spam or not or is there any doubt that it may be something spammy ?

Following is a quote from one of John's articles --

How much traffic can you get from indexed forum threads? When we disabled session ID’s for Google, allowing the Googlebot to index the Concrete Home Forum, the traffic on that site shot up over 400% in the first month. Forums for Marketing.

Also this from the Google Guidelines for Webmasters --

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page. http://www.google.com/support/webmas...y?answer=35769

Although not specifically about optimizing your forum, you might also find John's article about How To Build a Successful Forum quite helpful too.

[ninjashoes]

Originally Posted by vistadivine.com

The most important thing is to make the URLs static buy vbSEO for this.

Static and Dynamic URL's are the same thing for Google. Look at all the biggest vbulletin forums that dont use modrewrite and get spidered just fine. The only thing that vbSeo will do is put content relevent keywords in your url. It might help slightly but this strategy was too easily spammed and no longer helps relevency enough to be worth the extra server load these mod rewrite hacks cause. I used mod rewrite for awhile but found it didnt help very much if at all. I turned it off and now I have thousand of useless links in search engines and have to wait for them to work their way out. One good backlink is worth 1000 times what mod rewrite does which is basically nothing. Dont use this forum as an example, it was doing great before mod rewrite. Any claims of success can easily be attributed to quality backlinks and good page design.

Vbseo does much more than mod rewrite however and some of the features will help SEO alot. You can also use the free equivelent Zointz Seo which includes optional mod rewrite.

Here is a forum with lots of ways you can improve your vbulletin SEO for free.

http://www.vbulletin-faq.com/forum/f...splay.php?f=17

[Blazed]

Go for vBullein and buy vbSEO to optimize your forums.

[ninjashoes]

Originally Posted by Blazed

Go for vBullein and buy vbSEO to optimize your forums.

buy vbseo but dont use mod rewrite

also get vbadvanced and make it so about 40 threads display on your front page so much content gets slurped up

[abidsultan]

Originally Posted by Cricket

Following is a quote from one of John's articles --



Also this from the Google Guidelines for Webmasters --



Although not specifically about optimizing your forum, you might also find John's article about How To Build a Successful Forum quite helpful too.

well, thanks alot, i've gone through all this, that was really helpfull.

[abidsultan]

Originally Posted by ninjashoes

Static and Dynamic URL's are the same thing for Google. Look at all the biggest vbulletin forums that dont use modrewrite and get spidered just fine. The only thing that vbSeo will do is put content relevent keywords in your url. It might help slightly but this strategy was too easily spammed and no longer helps relevency enough to be worth the extra server load these mod rewrite hacks cause. I used mod rewrite for awhile but found it didnt help very much if at all. I turned it off and now I have thousand of useless links in search engines and have to wait for them to work their way out. One good backlink is worth 1000 times what mod rewrite does which is basically nothing. Dont use this forum as an example, it was doing great before mod rewrite. Any claims of success can easily be attributed to quality backlinks and good page design.

Vbseo does much more than mod rewrite however and some of the features will help SEO alot. You can also use the free equivelent Zointz Seo which includes optional mod rewrite.

Here is a forum with lots of ways you can improve your vbulletin SEO for free.

http://www.vbulletin-faq.com/forum/f...splay.php?f=17

yes, i agree that quality backlinks is the key to your successfull SEO for forum or site.

nice, they are well explaining all about it at vbulletin faq.
anyone may take advantage of it, just click on the following link
http://www.vbulletin-faq.com/forum/s...ead.php?t=2410

[Blazed]

Originally Posted by ninjashoes

buy vbseo but dont use mod rewrite

also get vbadvanced and make it so about 40 threads display on your front page so much content gets slurped up

then you must use Forum SEO by Zoints
www.zoints.com i guess else you can goto www.vbulletin.org for various mods and hacks for vbulletin.

[trichnosis]

i think forum urls must be clean . this means not using session IDs in your forum url

[ninjashoes]

Originally Posted by Blazed

then you must use Forum SEO by Zoints
www.zoints.com i guess else you can goto www.vbulletin.org for various mods and hacks for vbulletin.

yep I use zoints with mod rewrite turned off, even the creator of zoints seo now says that mod rewrite is useless

[Thomas Schulz]

I still tend to think it is a seo advantage to have good clean urls with good keywords... So, if it is possible, why not do it? Seems like v7n does as well.

[Blazed]

Originally Posted by ninjashoes

yep I use zoints with mod rewrite turned off, even the creator of zoints seo now says that mod rewrite is useless

Buddy it's just you need to do a basic SEO to your site plus some greyhat SEO lol and it will be awsome for you in getting high ranking in google.com

[ninjashoes]

Originally Posted by Thomas Schulz

I still tend to think it is a seo advantage to have good clean urls with good keywords... So, if it is possible, why not do it? Seems like v7n does as well.

because when it comes time to upgrade your forum you might have to wait for a new version of vbseo or zoints etc.

What happens if lets say vbseo decides to pull out because the current SEO enviroment doesent need them anymore? When it comes time to upgrade your forum you can either keep your old version or lose all your search engine links which will take 6+months to correct itself and could serioulsy hurt your seo/pr.

Even if you do your own modrewrite you will have to reimplement it when its time to upgrade.

Mod rewrite also causes extra strain on the servers resources which can slow down larger forums. I heard v7n mention this in a couple posts, you can ask him to confirm this.

If it wasnt for these things I might agree with you but as far as keywords in urls go I dont think they help much anymore unless they are in the actual domain.

for example

www . shoes . com = great results if someone searches for shoes

www . hamburger . com/shoes = wont help you much

In google Im pretty sure keywords in the url dont help much at all while in yahoo I think they might help a bit more. It just goes to show that search engines are constantly changing and becoming more relevent all the time for users and using easily spammed strategies likes keywords in urls will help less and less overtime because anyone can do it just like meta keywords.

v7n's success came long before implementing mod rewrite so we cannot use it as an example.

[dcristo]

Originally Posted by abidsultan

hi,

while optimizing a forum which factors are to be considered more as compare to any website or (root)

what should be dont and what shouldent be?
(urls at forum are definitely dynamic, so keep into account this too).

regards,
Abid Sultan
<mod edit: no sigs in body of post>

Just take into account all the SEO factors you would with any other site, it's still all applicable.

[Sadu]

Hmm,

Can't say I agree with the idea of not using mod_rewrite.

Big sites with stacks of link power can belligerently ignore basic SEO practice and still rank well. But they are not ranking at their best until they get the basics right. TradeMe (the Ebay equivalent in New Zealand) just fixed their ugly URLs and some other on-page issues, and all of a sudden I'm starting to find them in search results for random long-tail phrases. Really, this could have been done years ago.

And the whole point of forum SEO is to get random long-tail phrases.

SEO issues aside, mod_rewrite makes your links more clickable.

fancy www.domain.com/showforum.php?topicid=4363
or how about http://www.domain.com/forums/title-o...here-4363.html

I still find it surprising that most forum software doesn't use mod_rewrite by default (or even at all). I consider it a critical part of SEO, and I wouldn't use a host that doesn't have mod_rewrite enabled. I also wouldn't run a PHP forum on IIS, though ISAPI rewrite is pretty similar anyway.

When you are starting out you need every advantage you can get. Different rules for more established players out there I guess.

Just my thoughts. Feel free to disagree.