Best Advice Regarding The Vbulletin Archive?
 

We have a very large forum running over 3.8, and because of that we have a very large archive.

The archive is not really causing a duplicate content issue, as Google seems to know the difference and there are variations in the meta and title tags.

However, I do notice that sometimes Google will index the archive version instead of the full version OR give the archive version a higher ranking.

Also, the archive pages are obviously coming up as being non-mobile friendly.

I was pondering the possibility of just doing a 301 redirect, archive page to full page and turning archive pages off - but because of the high volume of archive pages indexed (hundreds of thousands) - I'm not sure if that will hurt me or help me - or a combo of both.

I see VB.org has their archive still in place and it doesn't seem to hurt them when searching for VB items on Google.

Disable archive is a good way to solve your problem.

I also disabled it on my web hosting forum and the forum is still getting good rankings on search engines.

I disabled the archive a couple years ago. I believe there is a mod to redirect but I am not sure if there is a version for VB4.

As for the archive here on VB.org we do not really know how or if it is impacting results. Vb.org has a ton of rank via other reasons.

I have more than a few Archive pages indexed. More like hundreds of thousands of pages. Some that have been indexed for over a decade. If I just 301 redirect hundreds of thousands of pages, I'm just wondering what the blowback will be.