vB 4.0 SEO Features

.v0id

New Member
vBulletin 4.0 will include a few features that will help your community content be better indexed by search engines.

Search engine optimisation is an inexact science, and when putting together the slate of features we spent time researching the latest thinking around what factors lead to positive benefits, including absorbing existing research on sites such as seomoz.org.

The features that have been created for vBulletin 4.0 are the main factors that we consider will have the greatest positive impact in terms of search engine ranking. Instead of including hundreds of options that can be infinitely tweaked, the features chosen consist of semantic HTML packed with content meta-data, the reduction in the amount of duplicate content and search engine friendly URLS for forums, threads and member profile pages.

Built in features

Keyword Use in Title Tag - The HTML title of the key vBulletin pages now better represents the content within the page, and extraneous information (such as "Page x") have now been removed.

NOFOLLOW tag for all external links.

Duplicate content reduced - by altering the operation of the showpost.php file to redirect cleanly to showthread.php.

Meta description and keywords - now populated with relevant, meaningful page level content, including tag data and content snippets.

Friendly URL options

For 4.0, there is a new area within the admin control panel that will allow you to switch on friendly URLs that will work in conjunction with server redirects (.htaccess) where supported.

blog_attachment.php


For threads, the following URL structures for threads, member profiles and forums are created for each of the options:

Standard URLs - as exists at present:
  • showthread.php?t=12345
  • member.php?u=12345
  • forumdisplay.php?f=123

Basic Friendly URLs:
  • showthread.php?1234-Thread-Title
  • member.php?1234-Username
  • forumdisplay.php?12-Forum-Title

Advanced Friendly URLs
  • showthread.php/1234-Thread-Title
  • member.php/1234-Username
  • forumdisplay.php/12-Forum-Title

Mod Rewrite Friendly URLs
  • threads/1234-Thread-Title
  • members/1234-Username
  • forums/1234-Forum-Title

Search Engine Sitemap

vBulletin 4.0 will include a built in XML site map system that provides a machine readable index of forum posts and threads.

Google and other supported search engines will be able to access the sitemap, which will facilitate a greater amount of site content being included within the search engine index.


If you have any questions, suggestions or thoughts on the planned SEO functionality for vBulletin 4.0, please post a comment. Thanks!

More development blog posts coming soon.
 

ChanceEncounter

New Member
nielz_01 said:
it is end of vbseo?
Don't think so. There's always a niche for SEO specialists to continue enhancing SEO across forum software. SEO is an ever evolving field, as more and more try to gain an advantage with the search engine, and people will keep coming up with new and better things to keep up.

vBSEO probably won't be going anywhere.
 

moiz615

New Member
as .v0id explained the Friendly url system, one cannot compete with vBSEO friendly URLS.
vBSEO is much better than builtin system of vb4
 
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