Huge Decrease in Number of Forum Pages Indexed
 

Hi All,

I am working on a forum that is more than 6 years old and I am facing a serious problem. Can anyone help me out?

Based on my understanding, Vbulletin by default allows every post and thread to have at least 10 different urls that can access it. For example, a post on a vbulletin forum could be expressed as:

/forum/showthread.php?t=54321
/forum/showthread.php?t=54321&p=22446688
/forum/showthread.php?t=54321&page=2
/forum/showthread.php?mode=hybrid&t=54321
/forum/showthread.php?p=22446688&mode=linear#post22446688
/forum/showthread.php?p=22446688&mode=threaded#post224466 88
/forum/showthread.php?t=34567&goto=nextnewest
/forum/showthread.php?t=87654&goto=nextoldest
/forum/showthread.php?goto=lastpost&t=54321
/forum/showpost.php?p=22446688
/forum/showpost.php?p=22446688&postcount=45
/forum/printthread.php?t=54321

and that is without introducing urls that include the page parameter, for threads that are more than one page long, and the pp parameter for changing the default number of posts per page; either or both of which can be added to most of the urls above too.

It is important to keep as many of those out as possible other than the basic /forum/showthread.php?t=54321 version.

Another big problem is the "next" and "previous" links that cause massive duplicate content issues because they allow a thread like
/forum/showthread.php?t=54321 to be indexed as
/forum/showthread.php?t=34567&goto=nextnewest and as
/forum/showthread.php?t=87654&goto=nextoldest too.

Additionally if any of the three threads is bumped, the "next" and "previous" links that are indexed no longer point to the same thread, because they contain the thread number of the thread that they were ON (along with the goto parameter), not the real thread number of the thread that they actually pointed to.

Due to these problems, I have huge number of Duplicate Titles and Duplicate Descriptions appearing at my webmaster tool. Can anyone assist me suggest some solution this?

you do know how to use the robots.txt file dont you?

Thank you for your reply, but my problem is that I get almost an equal share of visits to both ?=P and ?=t sections. So, I cant think of sacrificing either of them. Any other solutions?

Regards

Maybe you can start including rel="nofollow" in those prev/next links in your style.

thank you, but is there a way where I need not put the ?=p and ?=t in robots, and at the same time, they dont qualify as errors in webmaster tool?