VB3 Archive - Suggestion
 

vBulletin-

I am assuming vBulletin is not aware that their archive is not search engine friendly in a complete form.

VB2 had the same archive setup.

What I mean by this is that none of the actual archives pickup "Google Page Rank". If you use the Google Toolbar to determine the page rank on the archive, every archive that is built by vBulletin has a PR of 0/10.

We had a quick mod_rewrite installed and now the forum is taking on Page Rank.

Your archive allows spiders to spider the archive, but it does not allow page rank to be passed. This means that users of your archive will have a hard time gaining position with their archive.

Currently it only serves the purpose of increasing the amount of pages indexed by Google.

This is because of the /archive/<b>index.php</b>/

Our mod_rewrite changes this to /archive/, getting rid of the index.php.

I suggest fixing this because it provides ten times better search engine rankings.

If you are already aware of this problem, my apologies, but it was brought up a long time ago, and VB3 didn't include this update.

Thanks.

J.O.

Google.com has essentially changed the way that it tracks data, and from some accounts (including my own sites), it is handling sessions now - astonishingly, enough! That said, because vB3 has no sessionhash, is there any need for the archive, short of archiving posts beyond the time display threshhold??

I have the same feeling that pages without /index.php/ are indexed better. But unlike other sites getting all pages indexed in google has a lower priority for vb.org as our main audience does not come from search engines. Our site is meaningful to licensed vb users and they don't need google to find us. ;) But I guess Xenon will still consider your suggestion when he has some free time in his hands.

Thanks for your suggestion! :)

I would be interested in hearing more about how you accomplished this and use it on our forums. Can you explain it a bit more please?

I guess there is already a hack released here. Dont remember if jeoworks's or anyother hackers though..

It should be noted that the Archive feature in vB3 was not built with Google in mind . The URLs of the main forums are built with Google in mind and it will index them just fine and you will see the corresponding pagerank when it has done so.

The archive is made specifically for spiders from other search engines like Yahoo (formerly Inktomi) and Fast. These spiders do better with the forum content in that display than they do with the standard front-end.

Well I posted a thread only 5 months ago that gets slammed from google, has over 6,000 views: (as an example)
http://forums.infoprosjoint.net/showthread.php?t=4544
And has no page rank at all from what my toolbar says. This is why I asked.
Seems like this page might have a rank of a 1 at least by this time. Google is on our forums more than I am. ;)
I've been upgrading with every RC released containing the new archive.

Google is toning down on the fact that archives can reach a high page rank and value, but it is still a very important thing.

I don't think many people realize how much of an improvement an archive that gets page rank can be. It can add thousands of visitors a day.

I think the reason it has not been brought up is because people really don't pay attention to the forum archive close enough.

But anyways, here is a link to someone on these forums who built a successful forum archive hack:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...ht=vb3+archive

The person who created this hack is in no way related to me. But this hack does work for the purpose it was intended. The maker of the hack has a page rank of 3/10, showing that this hack does allow page rank to be given to an archive.

I highly suggest installing this hack for a short term solution.

My programmers will be finalizing a hack here within the next month that will give a full solution to the archive in VB3. I will release it on these forums.

one of the problems with the stock archive is that it appears to use subdirectories, which become farther and away from your root directory, wrt relevence, as far as Googlebot is concerned.

a better archive schema is:

yourdomain.com/keyword-archive-variablestring.html

then use mod_rewrite to call the actual page in the archive you want. I used this technique with my old phpBB2 board (not the archive, but I hacked the whole forum) to achieve 45,000 pages indexed in Google). The results were amazing.

I am planning on improving the vB3 archive once I get my new site design finished later this week. I just need to digest the archive script and change where it writes the links to my schema, then I write the .htaccess mod_rewrite rules to remap these rewritten URLs back to the stock format. As long as all your links, image tags, etc. are absolute, it works fine.

If anyone has already fooled around with the archive index.php script and would like to help out, drop me a pm and we can bang this out quicker. If you care about Googlebot, you definitely want to do this.

James