[firstimecaller]

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