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vBulletin SEO - The Ultimate Guide
vBulletin SEO: This article will attempt to go into detail on the many things that you can do to optimize your vBulletin forum for Search Engines. The Search Engine algorithms are not known and all information inside of this article is purely based on the hints that they do give us and things that I believe a search engine will be looking at when they try to determine where a web page ranks on their Search Engine Results Page (SERP's). This article is purely my opinion on how to properly SEO vBulletin. I feel that the advice given here is the best way to go about optimizing vBulletin. Feel free to ask questions and discuss all that is being said within this article. All opinions are welcome![b]
Why Does vBulletin Need SEO?
--------------------------------------------------
vBulletin has alot of flaws out of the box in regards to SEO but it's biggest flaw is it's url structure. For an example of why you should take advantage of mod_rewrite to remove duplicate urls and consolidate them into one url per thread you can take a look at this example that shows how many urls can point to the same thread on vBulletin: Why are my Google ranks so awful? - vBulletin SEO Forums. I don't know much of another way to stress this to you other than to put it frankly that vBulletin out of the box is not SEO friendly. If Google/Yahoo/MSN arrive at your site via 5 different urls and all 5 of those urls are going to the exact same content then how in the world can the search engine choose the correct url? It will help you greatly to take advantage of mod_rewrite and consolidate all those urls into one url. So Google can only find one url for one thread. One url for one post. This can not in anyway hurt you. Logic says it can only help.
So I ask you, multiple urls for the same thread or one?
I highly recommend taking advantage of mod_rewrite to consolidate all those URLS into one url per thread. For more information on current products that can do this please refer to vBulletin SEO Friendly URLs.
The next problem with vBulletin in stock form is the duplicate content issue. Most importantly the archive, printthread and showpost pages. VBSEO takes care of the showpost pages by allowing you to use anchor text to find the post. The other two can be taken care of with robots.txt (or all three if you don't have VBSEO.)
Links
--------------------------------------------------
The biggest thing you can do to improve your SEO is to get inbound links to your forums mainpage and to the indvidual threads. The more links you have the better your odds are at getting that particular page to rank well for the keywords on the page. When you are getting these links you should also attempt to have the appropriate anchor text for the link. Whenever I link back to my sites on another forum I use the site name in it. Whenever I link back to individual forums or threads on my site I always use the forum name or thread title as the anchor text. It does not take much time at all to do this and can not hurt you in no way.
VBSEO has a great feature in their VBSEO program that encourages linking to threads on your site and will also make you aware of every public link that is pointing to a thread on your site. You can see how it works by going to this thread: Links To This Thread. You will see at the bottom of the page a section that will show you all the sites that are linking to that thread. This has many good uses. You get to see who is talking about your content and what they have to say and you can now give incentive on getting a backlink and in return you linkback to a relevant source of information, something that Google encourages.
This feature also exposes one important thing about vBulletin sites linking to you that use the default urls. You will notice that you will get multiple links coming in from the same thread. Each link however will have different parameters in the link but it will take you to the same page. This shows that the default urls that vBulletin generates are flawed.
Remove The Archive
--------------------------------------------------
Remove all references to the Archive from your forum and disallow access to the Archive via the robots.txt file. The Archive is nothing but low quality duplication of your threads and with Google's recent trend toward stricter duplicate content filters your goal should be to provide Google with one source for the thread contents only. This ensures 100% of your link weight goes to the correct thread. You don't want your archive competing with your real thread for good SERP rankings.
On Page SEO
--------------------------------------------------
As long as you make it clear what your site is about near the top of the page the search engine will be able to figure it out as well. Try to put the keyword in your links in your navigation bar, as long as it still makes sense to the user and does not look out of place. Also use the <hx> tags correctly (explained later) so that your code confirms with w3c standards and makes a good outline of your forum. This outline could prove useful for the search engine if the tags are used correctly.
Try to only use text links as your navigation. If you use images you will not benefit from keywords in the anchor text. Stay away from Javascript and Flash navigation.
Make it easy for search engines to find your pages. Turn your archive into a sitemap by changing the following setting in your vBulletin Options: Search Engine Friendly Archive -> Display Simple View of Threads -> No. This will make the archive link to the actual thread instead of the simplified archive page resulting in the link PR being passed directly to the showthread page.
Open Up Your Threads For Guests!
Do you have all of your forums turned off for guests? If so you are missing out on any chance on getting links to those threads and search engines to index those threads. So if the content can be viewed by guests then let the search engines at it!
Title Tags
Title tags are also very important. On your forumhome, using your keywords for the site, very briefly give an idea of what the site is about and what it offers the end user. Make sure you also edit the Powered by vBulletin part out of the title tags.
For example vBulletin Zone is a site about vBulletin Admins. Instead of just having the title tag say vBulletinzone.com or vBulletin Zone I want to give the search engine and the end user a bit more information and maybe sell the site abit. So I chose vBulletin Zone | Ultimate Resource for vBulletin Admins. What it does is include my keyword vBulletin within the title tag and then sells the site to the person that finds it via a search engine so that they know that the site is a resource for vBulletin Forum Admins.
For Forumdisplay I like to only show the Forum Title in the Title Tags. Personal preference. As long as you have the forum name showing first that is the most important thing.
For Showthread I put the thread title first and then follow it with a dash and the name of the site, vBulletin Zone.
Meta Description
Make sure you write a good description for your forum as Search Engines like to use the description meta tag to give a description of your site on the SERP pages.
<hx> Tags
I recommend using the <h1> tag on your site and follow that up with a <p> describing the content. There are many different locations you can put the <h1>/<p> tag combo. I prefer to have it as the very first thing after the <body> and use it as a replacement of the logo with CSS. This is not very easy for those not well versed in css/html.
In my opinion the <h1> tag is being devalued by Search Engines. While it is still recommended to use these to make a proper outline of your page the value as far as SEO goes is shrinking. Google recommends using an <h1> tag in their Webmaster Guidelines page. Therefore that tells me that they do not value that very much. If all your competitors are using <h1> tags and going after the same keywords that you are going after then how can an <h1> tag help you? When that happens it is things like links back to your site/forums/threads that begin to make the difference. You can get the edge by taking advantage of an SEO package that rewrites the vBulletin urls to create only one url to each thread in order to transfer the most link weight to one url and not spread it out over multiple urls.
With all that said you still want to use them. It can't hurt you and it can only help. So why not?
Repeat Thread Title in Every Post
This option will repeat your thread title as Re: Thread Title on every post within that thread further adding important keywords to your page. To enable this do the following: AdminCP -> vBulletin Options -> Message Posting and Editing Options -> Automatically Quote Post / Thread Title
Similar Threads
Make sure that Similar Threads are turned on with your forum. This allows 5 additional threads to be linked from the current thread and have some relevance to the current thread. This helps index your forum faster and provides relevant content to your users which search engines love.
Reduce the Amount of Code that Appears On Your Page
--------------------------------------------------
Reducing the amount of code that you use to generate a page can have lots of effects. It will reduce bandwidth costs, decrease page load times and allow search engines to get right to your content without having to read through all the excess code.
Removing Status Icon Table and Forum Rules From Forumhome, Forumdisplay and Showthread Pages
In my opinion there are things that show up on Forumhome, Forumdisplay and Showthread that are just not needed. This part will show you what they are and how to remove them. Note this is just something I do to clean up the templates and reduce the page size a bit and is not something critical to SEO. I do it just because I think it looks better and it may offer a slight edge in serps with the smaller page size/quicker load time of the page (every little thing you can do without sacrificing a good user experience helps).
First template we will look at is Forumhome:
At the very bottom of the forumhome template you will see two things that are not needed. One is the Icons Display letting you know what the status icons represent and the other is a login area to login and out of the forum. Now I don't think the status icons are necessary especially if you have status icons that users can easily tell mean New Posts or No New Posts, plus something with a padlock on it usually means its locked. The login code is redundant as well, its already above the fold and everyone uses that to login/out.
To remove this from your forumhome template find:
then find
and then remove all the code between those two comments. Simple as that, now the code is code.
Next Template to tackle is Forumdisplay:
Basically the same thing as about. Status Icon explanation and forum rules will be removed.
To do so in Forumdisplay find:
then find
and then remove all the code inside those comments.
To remove the Forum Rules in Forumdisplay find:
and delete that code. That should take care of Forumdisplay.
Now onto the last template, Showthread:
Only the Forum Rules will disappear in showthread since there are no Status Icons.
In Showthread find:
and remove the code. Simple as that!
Store CSS File As A File
Very simple trick to reduce the page size on all your forum pages. What you are doing is taking the style sheet css code out of the actual page and storing it in a seperate file and then it will be linked to with one line. vBulletin supports this by default.
In order to do this first you need to open up your FTP manager and navigate to the clientscript/ folder and then make sure that the vbulletin_css/ folder is chmod to 777.
Once it is set to 777 go to vBulletin Options > Style & Language Settings > Store CSS Stylesheets as Files? > Yes
This will store the css file out of the actual html file and into a seperate file. Make sure to look at the before and after to see the drastic decrease of code
Lose Tables and replace with CSS
While this will help reduce the code in your HTML page it is not for the beginner. You need to know alot about CSS and HTML to be able to rewrite tables into straight CSS. There are examples on this site of it being down.
The following on vBulletin Zone is done tableless:
The Entire Header
The Navigation Bar Below the Header
The Side Bar Boxes on ForumHome
The Footer
You can view the source to see it in action and check out the CSS file to see how it was done. There are many different ways you can go about this and it's really hard to give a generic example. The best way to learn is by reading up and looking at the source/css files of other sites to see how this is done. CSS is a very powerful tool for webmasters.
You may want to keep your eye on vBStandard which is creating the first completely CSS style for vBulletin. There is no current release date for the style at this moment.
Create a Sitemap
--------------------------------------------------
The two major search engines, Google and Yahoo, both have an area where you can submit sitemaps. Sitemaps are basically what the name implies. A map of the urls of your site. vBulletin has an excellent hack to create a sitemap for you automatically. The vBSEO Google/Yahoo Sitemap Generator will make a complete list of your forum urls. The script has many options including how many urls that you put into each sitemap file (Google limits the number of urls to 50,000 per file) and you can configure what urls go into the sitemap files (showthread, forumdisplay, showpost etc).
After you create your sitemap you can head over to the Google Sitemap website and the Yahoo Site Explorer so that you can submit these sites to their respective search engines.
Both sites give you a lot of useful information about your site as it sits in their search engine. Google goes into the most detail and even goes as far as allowing you to set how fast they crawl your site.
Create a Robots.txt File
--------------------------------------------------
With a robots.txt file you will be able to tell search engines exactly what not to crawl. This helps in a few ways:
- It keeps the search engines from indexing pages that are of no value to search engines. (private.php, newthread.php are good examples)
- When you tell them not to waste their time indexing these pages they will then be spending more time indexing pages that really do matter.
- It allows you to make sure duplicate content like the printthread.php files do not get indexed.
The following robots.txt file is used here at vBulletinZone:
What that is saying is that search engines are not allowed to index any of the files listed. Some of those may a bit overkill but it sure doesn't hurt to have them.
You place the robots.txt file in your domains root. Make sure it is your domains root meaning you can access it via http://www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt
If you have your forum at a subdirectory like http://www.yourdomain.com/forum/ then you want to add /forum/ to each entry in the robots.txt file. For example: Disallow: /forum/login.php
This article is Copyrighted to vBulletinZone.com. You may redistribute this article as long as you include a link back to vBulletin Zone and/or this thread.
Why Does vBulletin Need SEO?
--------------------------------------------------
vBulletin has alot of flaws out of the box in regards to SEO but it's biggest flaw is it's url structure. For an example of why you should take advantage of mod_rewrite to remove duplicate urls and consolidate them into one url per thread you can take a look at this example that shows how many urls can point to the same thread on vBulletin: Why are my Google ranks so awful? - vBulletin SEO Forums. I don't know much of another way to stress this to you other than to put it frankly that vBulletin out of the box is not SEO friendly. If Google/Yahoo/MSN arrive at your site via 5 different urls and all 5 of those urls are going to the exact same content then how in the world can the search engine choose the correct url? It will help you greatly to take advantage of mod_rewrite and consolidate all those urls into one url. So Google can only find one url for one thread. One url for one post. This can not in anyway hurt you. Logic says it can only help.
So I ask you, multiple urls for the same thread or one?
I highly recommend taking advantage of mod_rewrite to consolidate all those URLS into one url per thread. For more information on current products that can do this please refer to vBulletin SEO Friendly URLs.
The next problem with vBulletin in stock form is the duplicate content issue. Most importantly the archive, printthread and showpost pages. VBSEO takes care of the showpost pages by allowing you to use anchor text to find the post. The other two can be taken care of with robots.txt (or all three if you don't have VBSEO.)
Links
--------------------------------------------------
The biggest thing you can do to improve your SEO is to get inbound links to your forums mainpage and to the indvidual threads. The more links you have the better your odds are at getting that particular page to rank well for the keywords on the page. When you are getting these links you should also attempt to have the appropriate anchor text for the link. Whenever I link back to my sites on another forum I use the site name in it. Whenever I link back to individual forums or threads on my site I always use the forum name or thread title as the anchor text. It does not take much time at all to do this and can not hurt you in no way.
VBSEO has a great feature in their VBSEO program that encourages linking to threads on your site and will also make you aware of every public link that is pointing to a thread on your site. You can see how it works by going to this thread: Links To This Thread. You will see at the bottom of the page a section that will show you all the sites that are linking to that thread. This has many good uses. You get to see who is talking about your content and what they have to say and you can now give incentive on getting a backlink and in return you linkback to a relevant source of information, something that Google encourages.
This feature also exposes one important thing about vBulletin sites linking to you that use the default urls. You will notice that you will get multiple links coming in from the same thread. Each link however will have different parameters in the link but it will take you to the same page. This shows that the default urls that vBulletin generates are flawed.
Remove The Archive
--------------------------------------------------
Remove all references to the Archive from your forum and disallow access to the Archive via the robots.txt file. The Archive is nothing but low quality duplication of your threads and with Google's recent trend toward stricter duplicate content filters your goal should be to provide Google with one source for the thread contents only. This ensures 100% of your link weight goes to the correct thread. You don't want your archive competing with your real thread for good SERP rankings.
On Page SEO
--------------------------------------------------
As long as you make it clear what your site is about near the top of the page the search engine will be able to figure it out as well. Try to put the keyword in your links in your navigation bar, as long as it still makes sense to the user and does not look out of place. Also use the <hx> tags correctly (explained later) so that your code confirms with w3c standards and makes a good outline of your forum. This outline could prove useful for the search engine if the tags are used correctly.
Try to only use text links as your navigation. If you use images you will not benefit from keywords in the anchor text. Stay away from Javascript and Flash navigation.
Make it easy for search engines to find your pages. Turn your archive into a sitemap by changing the following setting in your vBulletin Options: Search Engine Friendly Archive -> Display Simple View of Threads -> No. This will make the archive link to the actual thread instead of the simplified archive page resulting in the link PR being passed directly to the showthread page.
Open Up Your Threads For Guests!
Do you have all of your forums turned off for guests? If so you are missing out on any chance on getting links to those threads and search engines to index those threads. So if the content can be viewed by guests then let the search engines at it!
Title Tags
Title tags are also very important. On your forumhome, using your keywords for the site, very briefly give an idea of what the site is about and what it offers the end user. Make sure you also edit the Powered by vBulletin part out of the title tags.
For example vBulletin Zone is a site about vBulletin Admins. Instead of just having the title tag say vBulletinzone.com or vBulletin Zone I want to give the search engine and the end user a bit more information and maybe sell the site abit. So I chose vBulletin Zone | Ultimate Resource for vBulletin Admins. What it does is include my keyword vBulletin within the title tag and then sells the site to the person that finds it via a search engine so that they know that the site is a resource for vBulletin Forum Admins.
For Forumdisplay I like to only show the Forum Title in the Title Tags. Personal preference. As long as you have the forum name showing first that is the most important thing.
For Showthread I put the thread title first and then follow it with a dash and the name of the site, vBulletin Zone.
Meta Description
Make sure you write a good description for your forum as Search Engines like to use the description meta tag to give a description of your site on the SERP pages.
<hx> Tags
I recommend using the <h1> tag on your site and follow that up with a <p> describing the content. There are many different locations you can put the <h1>/<p> tag combo. I prefer to have it as the very first thing after the <body> and use it as a replacement of the logo with CSS. This is not very easy for those not well versed in css/html.
In my opinion the <h1> tag is being devalued by Search Engines. While it is still recommended to use these to make a proper outline of your page the value as far as SEO goes is shrinking. Google recommends using an <h1> tag in their Webmaster Guidelines page. Therefore that tells me that they do not value that very much. If all your competitors are using <h1> tags and going after the same keywords that you are going after then how can an <h1> tag help you? When that happens it is things like links back to your site/forums/threads that begin to make the difference. You can get the edge by taking advantage of an SEO package that rewrites the vBulletin urls to create only one url to each thread in order to transfer the most link weight to one url and not spread it out over multiple urls.
With all that said you still want to use them. It can't hurt you and it can only help. So why not?
Repeat Thread Title in Every Post
This option will repeat your thread title as Re: Thread Title on every post within that thread further adding important keywords to your page. To enable this do the following: AdminCP -> vBulletin Options -> Message Posting and Editing Options -> Automatically Quote Post / Thread Title
Similar Threads
Make sure that Similar Threads are turned on with your forum. This allows 5 additional threads to be linked from the current thread and have some relevance to the current thread. This helps index your forum faster and provides relevant content to your users which search engines love.
Reduce the Amount of Code that Appears On Your Page
--------------------------------------------------
Reducing the amount of code that you use to generate a page can have lots of effects. It will reduce bandwidth costs, decrease page load times and allow search engines to get right to your content without having to read through all the excess code.
Removing Status Icon Table and Forum Rules From Forumhome, Forumdisplay and Showthread Pages
In my opinion there are things that show up on Forumhome, Forumdisplay and Showthread that are just not needed. This part will show you what they are and how to remove them. Note this is just something I do to clean up the templates and reduce the page size a bit and is not something critical to SEO. I do it just because I think it looks better and it may offer a slight edge in serps with the smaller page size/quicker load time of the page (every little thing you can do without sacrificing a good user experience helps).
First template we will look at is Forumhome:
At the very bottom of the forumhome template you will see two things that are not needed. One is the Icons Display letting you know what the status icons represent and the other is a login area to login and out of the forum. Now I don't think the status icons are necessary especially if you have status icons that users can easily tell mean New Posts or No New Posts, plus something with a padlock on it usually means its locked. The login code is redundant as well, its already above the fold and everyone uses that to login/out.
To remove this from your forumhome template find:
HTML Code:
<!-- icons and login code --> HTML Code:
<!-- / icons and login code --> Next Template to tackle is Forumdisplay:
Basically the same thing as about. Status Icon explanation and forum rules will be removed.
To do so in Forumdisplay find:
HTML Code:
<!-- icon key --> HTML Code:
<!-- / icon key --> To remove the Forum Rules in Forumdisplay find:
HTML Code:
<td width="100%"> <div class="smallfont"> </div> <if condition="$show['threadslist']">$forumrules</if> </td>
Now onto the last template, Showthread:
Only the Forum Rules will disappear in showthread since there are no Status Icons.
In Showthread find:
HTML Code:
<td class="smallfont" align="$stylevar[left]"> $forumrules </td>
Store CSS File As A File
Very simple trick to reduce the page size on all your forum pages. What you are doing is taking the style sheet css code out of the actual page and storing it in a seperate file and then it will be linked to with one line. vBulletin supports this by default.
In order to do this first you need to open up your FTP manager and navigate to the clientscript/ folder and then make sure that the vbulletin_css/ folder is chmod to 777.
Once it is set to 777 go to vBulletin Options > Style & Language Settings > Store CSS Stylesheets as Files? > Yes
This will store the css file out of the actual html file and into a seperate file. Make sure to look at the before and after to see the drastic decrease of code
Lose Tables and replace with CSS
While this will help reduce the code in your HTML page it is not for the beginner. You need to know alot about CSS and HTML to be able to rewrite tables into straight CSS. There are examples on this site of it being down.
The following on vBulletin Zone is done tableless:
The Entire Header
The Navigation Bar Below the Header
The Side Bar Boxes on ForumHome
The Footer
You can view the source to see it in action and check out the CSS file to see how it was done. There are many different ways you can go about this and it's really hard to give a generic example. The best way to learn is by reading up and looking at the source/css files of other sites to see how this is done. CSS is a very powerful tool for webmasters.
You may want to keep your eye on vBStandard which is creating the first completely CSS style for vBulletin. There is no current release date for the style at this moment.
Create a Sitemap
--------------------------------------------------
The two major search engines, Google and Yahoo, both have an area where you can submit sitemaps. Sitemaps are basically what the name implies. A map of the urls of your site. vBulletin has an excellent hack to create a sitemap for you automatically. The vBSEO Google/Yahoo Sitemap Generator will make a complete list of your forum urls. The script has many options including how many urls that you put into each sitemap file (Google limits the number of urls to 50,000 per file) and you can configure what urls go into the sitemap files (showthread, forumdisplay, showpost etc).
After you create your sitemap you can head over to the Google Sitemap website and the Yahoo Site Explorer so that you can submit these sites to their respective search engines.
Both sites give you a lot of useful information about your site as it sits in their search engine. Google goes into the most detail and even goes as far as allowing you to set how fast they crawl your site.
Create a Robots.txt File
--------------------------------------------------
With a robots.txt file you will be able to tell search engines exactly what not to crawl. This helps in a few ways:
- It keeps the search engines from indexing pages that are of no value to search engines. (private.php, newthread.php are good examples)
- When you tell them not to waste their time indexing these pages they will then be spending more time indexing pages that really do matter.
- It allows you to make sure duplicate content like the printthread.php files do not get indexed.
The following robots.txt file is used here at vBulletinZone:
Code:
User-agent: * Disallow: /admincp/ Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /clientscript/ Disallow: /includes/ Disallow: /install/ Disallow: /modcp/ Disallow: /sitemap/ Disallow: /tags/ User-agent: * Disallow: /printthread.php Disallow: /subscription.php Disallow: /payments.php Disallow: /profile.php Disallow: /faq.php Disallow: /calendar.php Disallow: /private.php Disallow: /sendmessage.php Disallow: /sendmessage.php?do= Disallow: /showgroups.php Disallow: /reputation.php Disallow: /report.php Disallow: /threadrate.php Disallow: /postings.php Disallow: /newthread.php Disallow: /search.php Disallow: /newreply.php Disallow: /register.php Disallow: /login.php Disallow: /faq.php Disallow: /image.php Disallow: /cron.php Disallow: /joinrequests.php Disallow: /usercp.php Disallow: /vbseocp.php
You place the robots.txt file in your domains root. Make sure it is your domains root meaning you can access it via http://www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt
If you have your forum at a subdirectory like http://www.yourdomain.com/forum/ then you want to add /forum/ to each entry in the robots.txt file. For example: Disallow: /forum/login.php
This article is Copyrighted to vBulletinZone.com. You may redistribute this article as long as you include a link back to vBulletin Zone and/or this thread.
Last edited by Brandon; 05-27-2007 at 08:43 PM.
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