SEO for vBulletin and how to stop a forum ruining your website
Adding a forum to your website can seem like a great way to increase the amount of natural content and build traffic to your site. However the nature of a forum means they are full of duplicate content, noisy low value pages and attract very few external links.
Link equity has become a major factor over the last 12 months, if you have too many pages on your site then your link equity will be spread too thinly and your site will not reach its full potential in Google.
Aaron Wall sums this up nicely:
If you are wasting link equity getting low value noisy pages indexed then your high value pages will not rank as well as they could because you wasted link equity getting low value pages indexed. In some cases getting many noisy navigational pages indexed could put your site on a reduced crawling status (shallow crawl or less frequent crawl) that may preclude some of your higher value long tail brand specific pages from getting indexed.
Aside from building some natural links the best way to stop a forum using up too much of your valuable link equity is to stop the low value, noisy pages being indexed. My preferred method is to use the following robots.txt file for vBulletin:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /forums/archive/
Disallow: /forums/admincp/
Disallow: /forums/attachments/
Disallow: /forums/calendar.php
Disallow: /forums/clientscript/
Disallow: /forums/cpstyles/
Disallow: /forums/customavatars/
Disallow: /forums/customprofilepics/
Disallow: /forums/faq.php
Disallow: /forums/images/
Disallow: /forums/install/
Disallow: /forums/includes/
Disallow: /forums/login.php
Disallow: /forums/misc.php
Disallow: /forums/member.php
Disallow: /forums/modcp/
Disallow: /forums/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forums/newreply.php
Disallow: /forums/newthread.php
Disallow: /forums/private.php
Disallow: /forums/register.php
Disallow: /forums/sendmessage.php
Disallow: /forums/signaturepics/
Disallow: /forums/sendpm.php
Disallow: /forums/search.php
To remove any noisy pages already indexed you would need to block them using robots.txt and then visit Google Webmaster Central and use the “Url Removals” tool.
Most forum packages will have unique titles and meta description tags on all the pages - if yours doesn’t then you will need to figure out how to add these. The other pitfall to watch out for is your forum software appending session id’s to the url’s - this will harm your site in the search engines.
It is hard to cover all aspects of forum SEO in a blog post so if you have any questions please ask in the comments.
Categories: Search Engine Optimisation
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Generally I wouldn’t add in a forum unless it would end up benefiting users and gain its own userbase. If I had a forum with a userbase on one of my sites I’d definitely want it to get indexed and bring in more users. The important decision is whether or not to create a forum; will it really benefit your users, and gain a userbase so you don’t always need to contribute?
John King June 24, 2007 9:35 pm | Reply
What would you do if you ran a subscription based website. Would you allow the forum to get indexed to help drive traffic and convert traffic into subscriptions?
s July 6, 2007 10:23 pm | Reply
i have a forum site and on i have vbseo mod my question is its allows a member to login from mozilla but not from internet explorer, is vbseo creating an issue of sessions in internet explorer which is making poeple show they are loggin in but redirect them to the same main page without showing them they are logged.
jimmy June 27, 2008 3:37 pm | Reply