The Ultimate vBulletin Optimization Guide
If all you do when setting up a forum is install it and pray for posters you're going to have a hard time building it. There are certain tweaks and optimizations you can make to help build it and increase it's exposure. This article will explain what those things are. It will also cover tips and tricks on jump starting your forum activity.
I am also going to focus exclusively on vbulletin software for the purposes of this tutorial. I'm doing this both because I think that vbulletin is the best, and because I run 6 forums based on it. However, while this article will be most useful to vBulletin users, the concepts are true for all forum software.
Optimizing vBulletin for Search Engines
Search engines can be a huge source of traffic for your forum. A well indexed forum with hundreds of thousands or millions of posts dwarves nearly all other types of content sites when it comes to total pages of content indexed in search engines. If you allow (and encourage) search engines to index all your forum content it can be a hugely valuable source of traffic for you. Unfortunately forum software isn't always built with this in mind, but with a few tweaks you can get the search engine crawlers humming along on your site.
Session IDs and The Archive
Forums as a requirement need a way to track users, most of them do this with cookies. When the users do not accept cookies the forum usually defaults to putting a long string of letters and numbers in the URL, this string is called a session ID and is the bane of search engines everywhere. Luckily newer versions of vBulletin have the functionality to turn off session IDs in the URL for search engine spiders, so you do not have to install any hacks to accomplish this. If your forum software does not include this feature, it is a must have, more than anything else. Session IDs in the URL effectively kill the deep crawling of your forum.
So, assuming the session ID killer is working as it should, the next step is for you to turn off vBulletin's archive. vBulletin started including an archive system with version 3. This was meant to make it easier for search engines to crawl your forum, but instead it just complicates things. The vBulletin developers made the archive plainly formatted with no built in forum functionality, mostly just leaving thread content, the idea being to not distract search engines with a bunch of useless (from their point of view) code. The archive was also built so that it did not use query string navigation. This was done with the notion that query strings hamper search engine crawling and thus by removing in you can get more pages indexed. In fact neither of these features is desirable.
The fact is search engines have for some years now been able to crawl sites that use query strings just fine. There is an issue of speed, they tend to not crawl as fast on sites that they perceive to be dynamic (they don't want your site to crash any more than you do), but eventually a search engine should crawl a site that uses a query string just as deeply as a site that doesn't. The only thing they can get choked up on is an ever changing session ID in the query string, which I mentioned above.
As far as the plain vanilla layout of the archive goes, well sure, that's nice, but it isn't necessary. Search engines are used to weeding through copious amounts of formatting and other code to get to content. Also the archive is a step backwards as far as usability goes. When you use the archive people will find your site through the archive and that means that the first impression of your forum will be a plain "printable-version" of your forum with no enhanced functionality. In fact nothing on the page encourages visitors to delve deeper into your forum. If they cannot find the answer on the page they're viewing they're likely just to hit the back button and forget about your site rather than try to use the discouraging archive navigation.
If all that weren't enough, the archive creates a duplicate content issue. In general you want to maintain the rule of one URL per piece of content. With the archive you end up with two copies of each piece of content, one in the actual thread, one in the archive. Even without the looming specter of duplicate content penalties (which admittedly is unlikely in this case) you still have usability and incoming link issues.
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