5+ Hacks ! Which one to choose ? Inputs Please !

[PurpleCow]

Hello,

I am obviously very interested in making my boards as easy as possible for the search engines to index on their serps, particularly Google !

And yes, As far as my knowledge goes, there are already 3 popular hacks on vB.org, namely :

Spider friendly URLs By fastforward : This hack changes the actual URL's of the forums and threads, which is very interesting, b'cos it actually converts dynamic URL's to static URL's.

vbSpiderFriend - Search Engine Friendliness BY Overgrow : This hack attepts at archiving the entire boards in the form of static URL's leaving the actual threads and forums links dynamic.

Have Googlebot Crawl EVERYTHING (theoretically) By filburt1 : This hack attempts to remove the session hash in the URL's when it detects Googlebot crawling the boards and hence making the job of Google bot easier to crawl the entire boards.

I am actually more inclined towards using fastfarward's hack as it permanently converts the dynamic url's to static ones. Then again, archiving the board also would be very useful in the long run as the boards Grow in terms of participation ( ref : overgrow's hack ).

So this can be achieved by using both the hacks. But what scares me is that, since the two hacks will have different static URL's for each thread and forum, Google might percieve my forums as spamming, which i obviously don't want to happen.

Any solution to using both without any problems ?? Like integrating those two and making them have a same URL.

I'd be interested to read/hear some feedback and inputs from those who are already using any of these hacks or a combination of the 3 !!

And I am using Stable version of 2.3.0 !

Thank you for your time !

Cheers

[PurpleCow]

I noticed two more hacks very similiar to OverGrow's hack.

vbArchive - Search Engine Indexer for vBulletin By TECH

and

vB Easy Archive FINAL - Search Engine Spiderable Hack! Get your posts listed @ google - By SkuZZy

Any diferences between OverGrows hack and these two.

I am particularly interested in integrating fastfarward's hack and any of the 3 Archiving hacks ( preferably Overgrow's or TECH's hack )! and my forum is installed in a subdomain like this : http://forums.mydomain.com

Thank you

[PurpleCow]

Okay, assuming that, I have installed fastforward's hack, Is there any hack to archiving without using its own url system or conect. I mean this archiving hack should consider/use the URL's of fastforward's hack for the archiving purposes, instead of its own system ?

Any such hack here ??

Thanks

[Erwin]

You should not need an archive hack with fastforward's hack. It works very well by itself. Why double up?

[PurpleCow]

Erwin - It ultimatley helps in Search engine's Indexing.
I strongly believe, An archive could act as a site map.

And now with fastforward's hack, if i can have the archive links also pointing to the same URL.....that would be great for search engines and particularly Google.

Now, If i use any other hack, which will have a different url in the archive than the one by fastforward's...Google might in the long run percieve this as spamming and ban my site from the index completly, which is scary.

Thank you for any help !

Cheers

[DiscussAnything]

from what i've seen, the archive is actually a dynamically generated archive. It's not an actual full html backup of your site, but is generated when needed. If acting as a sitemap it may be less clear in buildup than the actual forum though.

[PurpleCow]

I guess anything dynamically generated is generated only on demand, right ?? In that case Archiving is also the same.
Or am I missing something ??

As long as static URL's are visible to the SE bots, makes its life more easier when its indexing ur site, it should be fine.

Also, those Archives can be kind of Backdoors to our forums.

Thanks

[heynurse]

PurpleCow,

I am also looking to ad one of these search engine hacks and I am wondering which one is the prefered hack to use. My main goals is to get indexed in google and to get Google adsense text ads to be relevent to my content on the pages.

Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks

[SVTBlackLight01]

Someone should make this a poll. I will be adding one of these soon and could use some help deciding.

[PurpleCow]

Based on my SEO ( Search Engine Optimisation ) knowledge, I strongly feel, if some one can help us with a archiving hack which will integrate or have URL's of the fastforward's hack for the archiving purposes, Google would love the boards and its indexing job should work like a charm.

Infact, all the archiving hacks are perfectly fine, just that I wish, one of them could integrate fastforward's hack for the archiving purposes !!

Thank you