[tweak] Get better results for your forum from search engines
 

Not getting as many hits for your forum from google or any other search engine?. Editing your meta tags in the forumhome template can really improve your results. This guide will teach you how to do this in two easy steps.

1: editing the meta tags

Open your forumhome template and find this block of code (near the top)

<meta name="keywords" content="vbulletin,forum,bbs,discussion,jelsoft">
<meta name="description" content="$bbtitle is a discussion forum powered by vBulletin. To visit the forum, go to $bburl/ . To find out about vBulletin, go to http://www.vbulletin.com/ .">

Edit this to your liking, adding things that relate to your site will give you better results. I run a anime site so ive edited mine to look like this.

<meta name="keywords" content="vbulletin,forum,bbs,discussion,jelsoft,an ime,japanese animation,fanart">
<meta name="description" content="$bbtitle is a forum for all anime fans to share their art work and disscuss anime, To visit the forum, go to $bburl/ .">



2. submit your forum to search engines

Submit your forum url to these search engines and watch em crawl..

Very good one, thanks!

This may come in handy, nice work. :)

thanks very good
and i do it

nice d00d!! thnx alot!

I used it..
tnx..
I wanted to change the metatags, but I didn't know where they were. Now I do. Tnx

The URL to submit the board link is broken. Is there another good place to submit a board link?

Contact AL via PM if he doesn't see this, I've got no idea which one he was linking too.

*Shrugs*

Thanks for this nice easy modification. I do have one concern.. Will this cause spiders to slow down my site a lot? I did this once a long time ago and it caused major problems. So much that my site went down for a little while.. I contacted the host and they told me it was because one of the search engines was going through my site like crazy.. I'd love to work this in but I'm just a bit worried about that happening again...

<a href="https://www.google.com/addurl.html" target="_blank">Click here</a> to submit your site to google.

Sal:

Spiders can take up your bandwidth yes, most of it is due to the loading of images and files of no usewitch are irelivant to the indexing process anyway. Use this to keep spiders from getting to your images and files that are no needed for content:

make a file named robots.txt and stick this in it. upload it to your ROOT public_html folder.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /forum/attachment.php
Disallow: /forum/avatar.php
Disallow: /forum/editpost.php
Disallow: /forum/member.php
Disallow: /forum/member2.php
Disallow: /forum/misc.php
Disallow: /forum/moderator.php
Disallow: /forum/newreply.php
Disallow: /forum/newthread.php
Disallow: /forum/online.php
Disallow: /forum/poll.php
Disallow: /forum/postings.php
Disallow: /forum/printthread.php
Disallow: /forum/private.php
Disallow: /forum/private2.php
Disallow: /forum/report.php
Disallow: /forum/search.php
Disallow: /forum/sendtofriend.php
Disallow: /forum/threadrate.php
Disallow: /forum/usercp.php
Disallow: /forum/admin/
Disallow: /forum/images/
Disallow: /forum/mod/

Of course you will need to change the /forum to your folder name that vBulletin resides in. mabey the /images to if you are using multiple image folders or a differnt name for it.

You don't need to ban access to misc (it has a FAQ, if that could ever help your ranking) and especially printthread which will redundantly include thread contents and will get you a lot more hits on Google :)

Has anything changed for version 2.3.0? For example, should we alter the robots.txt contents?

No changes.

do you need to do anything else to appear on search engines or does it just happen if someone types a keyword you have on your site?

The latter, usually. You, of course, usually need to initially submit your site ONLY ONCE! to Google. Submit it multiple times and they'll block you.

ty, submitted :) hate the fact they cant be sure if it will even go on :(

Thanks for the URL that way I can submit my site :) i'll keep that in mind too to save space

Ok, I feel like a total idiot.

I don't have meta tags anywhere in my FORUMHOME template. Where is the best place to insert this data?

You dont' need to edit any templates. You can alter keywords and description from the Admin control panel > VBoptions > General settings. Altering the keywords and description here will replace it in the headinclude template. Which means they meta data will appear an most pages.