Search Engine Optimization
 

Is there a way to make individual threads/posts spiderable by search engines? I've noticed by default, VB uses the Board name with a "-" followed by the thread/post subject title.

I want to change this so it only includes the tile of the threads, and I want it to be spiderable by search engines. Is there a hack out there for making posts spiderable?

Thanks.

There are such hacks, but they aren't needed to make your forum search engine friendly. So long as sessionids aren't used for spiders (which is true for VB3) you posts and threads will be crawled fine. If you do one of the URL rewriting hacks to put more keywords in the URL you're going to be forcing yourself to keep that URL structure forever, through all future updates (which might be hard or impossible) or you'll run into URL integrity issues, loss of backlinks, etc.

The only other things you should do are to turn the archive off (the archive creates duplicate content and typically it is less conducive to getting new registrations). Also using robots.txt block extra pages (such as backend/member/posting pages) from search engines. All search engines really need to see are the showthread, showpost, and showforum pages.

See: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=259001

use the seo hack from onseo.com :)

There is an EXCELLENT thread found here:

http://forum.time2dine.co.nz/showthread.php?t=98

It is focused around optimizing vBulletin 3.0.7 for search engines and gets into a lot of the detail regarding why the changes need to be made.

I've done most of the modifications from that URL and they seem to be working pretty well. I'm just waiting for all of my 301 redirects to take hold from my old forums URL to my new main URL.

In terms of search engine exposure, I also use LinkVault to provide static text links. After adding the link-vault code to my web site and displaying 5 text ads at the bottom of all my pages I've gained about 800 inbound links in the past month. That certainly will help your Google PR and get them indexing your site more frequently.

You might want to take a look here:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your VBulletin forum.