Serious SEO bug in vB4
 

Hi,

This morning I have noticed a serious bug in SEO-ed URL's in vB4.

Look at the first original URL

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showt...etin-community

and the modified one

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showt...cause-it-sucks


Notice any differences ?

I don't know how to classify that, but its both funny and downright idiotic at same time. How could vB devs allow something like that go unnoticed is beyond me. This can have serious implications on forum rankings, forum reputation and all range of other things. In short hell breaks loose.

This might have been known for a long time, but I just stumbled upon that this morning and thought it's worth sharing.

Regards,
Val.

Well it seems that this is a main part of the address :

And vBulletin dosen't mind what ever after this part ....

It can bee a serious SEO bug for vBulletin 4 !!

Please report it in bug tracer

Yes I know,
Providing that thread ID remains the same, you can pretty much write anything and it will lead you to same page.

This is as serious as it gets in your offsite forum reputation, your branding etc...

Imagine someone placing a link on his site (your competitor's site) with an URL http://www.yoursite.com/forum/showth...-black-hat-seo

I reported this bug, but nothing yet from vB team.

but its the same even with vbseo isnt it ? How does that impact seo ? :confused:

--------------- Added [DATE]1272021814[/DATE] at [TIME]1272021814[/TIME] ---------------

http://www.vbseo.com/f4/how-do-you-s...rrectly-42700/
http://www.vbseo.com/f4/valdet-climb...he-tree-42700/

No, in vbseo the URL is automatically fixed even if you manually change the link

Example:

Original link
http://www.vbseo.com/f55/can-vbseo-d...uy-today-3303/

Modified link:
http://www.vbseo.com/f55/testing-modified-link-3303/

As you see when clicking the second link, the URL in address bar gets fixed to its original format.

--------------- Added [DATE]1272021983[/DATE] at [TIME]1272021983[/TIME] ---------------

It's been a long time since I climbed on a tree, but thanks for mention :D

Oh ok..but I wonder if it will really make much difference in SEO, because Google doesnt seem to give any weight to words in rewritten URL's. Please correct me if I am wrong.

You can force the correct URL to guest users within the "Friendly URL" options (Off/Standard/Strict).

Thus, the URLs will be corrected if the wrong text is entered. However you can differ the option between guests/members - really it's only important to guests (and therefor spiders).

No fix yet ?

Since it wasn't broken, and was instead a user option he didn't have set, then no, I guess it wasn't fixed.