Earlier I had written about the duplicate content problem present in vBulletin and how to fix that to a certain degree. This post is a continuation of that post and is mainly based on optimizing the vBulletin Google sitemap made by vBSEO.
While the setup and configuration of the vBSEO Google/Yahoo Sitemap Generator is quite simple, choosing wrong options can prove counterproductive. So I am going to discuss few of the configuration options.
Include Show Post Pages: As stated in the earlier post, you should not enable this as this would lead to duplicate content and could divert search engine traffic to non performing pages.
Include Member Profile Pages: Whether or not you enable this option would depend mainly on the privacy policy that you have and whether or not you want to member profiles to come up in search engine results (which are unlikely to bring any relevant traffic). Though having this enabled shouldn’t hurt your SEO score neither should it pose duplicate content issue. My recommendation would be to disable it and let search engine spiders concentrate on your content pages.
Include Archive Pages: In my earlier post I had posted the method to make your archives work like sitemap and reduce the duplicate content issue. However it turns out that this step isn’t complete till you disable “Include Archive Pages†option in sitemap. Since the thread archive pages are still generated by vBulletin and if unchecked, would get included in search engine results.
Rest is pretty easy to figure out with most of the options enabled, have fun tweaking your forum.
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