So I was over at Webmaster World today and found a couple of really interesting discussions about vBulletin and the duplicate content issues it poses.
vBulletin like so many forum packages is and SEO nightmare of worst practices when it comes to query strings causing duplicate content. I single thread or post can sometimes be access by up to ten different URLs as a result of query strings.
Here were some tips that were suggested to reduce some of the duplicate content issues:
1) disable the "search engine friendly" archive. All this does is create a duplicate copy of your entire site, which is what we are trying to avoid. Oh and yes Chris you need to disable your archive for this forum.
2) Add the following entries to your robots.txt file This will stop bots from crawling pages they don't need to crawl:
3) eliminate the " « Previous Thread | Next Thread » " bread crumb at the bottom of threads. This can be found near the bottom of the "SHOW THREADS" template. The problem is that these two links create two additional copies of threads (e.g. /forum/showthread.php?t=87654&goto=nextoldest). This is bad, very bad and how many people actually notice these links actually exist let alone use them?Code:User-agent: * Disallow: /archive/ Disallow: /attachments/ Disallow: /calendar.php Disallow: /clientscript/ Disallow: /cpstyles/ Disallow: /customavatars/ Disallow: /customprofilepics/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /includes/ Disallow: /login.php Disallow: /newreply.php Disallow: /newthread.php Disallow: /private.php Disallow: /register.php Disallow: /sendmessage.php Disallow: /sendpm.php
The entire threads I referred to can be found at:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3133336.htm
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/33094.htm
I love using vBulletin, but it most certainly wasn't designed by someone who had a clue about SEO.
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