The comprehensive guide to forum SEO

By Rajab Bader on Mar 3, 2008 in SEO |

Forums and communities are an aspect of the internet and are a tool that people use to share ideas and experiences. However, to most webmasters, starting and promoting online communities is a hard task and SEO can play an important role in growing forums in any niche.

In this post, I’m going to share my experience with Vbulletin, the most popular forum software on the web, but you can also apply these tips to any other forum softwares just with more thinking and work.

On-Page Optimization

Duplicate-Content
Duplicate-content is a serious issue and often neglected by many forum owners, and therefore their sites may struggle to rank in the search engines.
The problem is that your threads are accessible both to search bots and visitors by different links. While users might be fine with this, search engines are not, because they want to keep their index clean and only have one original version of each document.

To solve this issue, you have to do a redirection using the .htaccess file which is in your site’s root. 301 redirection will redirect all pages on the non-www (sitename.com) version to the other one (www.sitename.com) or vice versa depending on which version you want to use.

Add the following lines to your .htaccess file and remember to change “sitename” to your domain name.
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^sitename.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.sitename.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://www.sitename.com/ [R=301,L]

URLs
Although many SEOs believe that descriptive links have no direct effect on ranking, I believe it is useful to have keywords in them. People who would link to your threads might not use relevant anchor texts but rather copy and paste the links . If your links are the VB’s default which has numbers and irrelevant, duplicated keywords, then you are missing on a huge potential of relevance and search traffic.

It is not just useful for SEO, but it is also useful to users as they can guess what the thread content is about from the link. So there is no harm to have descriptive urls.

With Vbulletin, there are two plugins that can do the job. One is VbSEO which is a paid one and is also supported (It has also many other SEO options) and ZointsSEO which is free but can do the job.

If you are willing to pay 149 bucks for VbSEO then go for it, if not, ZointSEO is the solution.

Once you install ZointsSEO, it will automatically modify the templates and fix all the links to the new ones. Just remember to 301 redirect the old ones to the new ones from ZointsSEO’s options in ACP. You can download and fine more information on this plugin here.

Title Tags
Titles are the most important element of OnPage SEO and therefore they can bring a lot of traffic if they are properly optimized and when the overall site is in a good shape.

Edit your style and remove the “powered by Vbulletin” phrase and also the forum name in thread titles (keep the sub-forums and threads titles) You can leave the forum name if branding is needed, but I prefer to have it removed.

In Vbulletin you can do this by removing “$vboptions[bbtitle]” from the title tag in your templates. For example, If I’m going to remove my forum name from the thread titles I would go to the “showthread” template, look for the title tag and remove that phrase. The same applies to other templates such as forumdisplay, memberlist …etc

Meta Description Tags
When you use VBSEO or Zoints SEO you will have the chance to write a unique description for each forum. As for threads the plugin will show the first 25 words from the thread’s content. Make sure you write good descriptions that will attract searchers from the search results.

Internal link structure
You have to improve your internal linking structure. If you have your forum in a sub-directory and VBadvanced in the root, add links of your main forum sections to the navigation so spiders can reach the content easily.

Also you should nofollow any links that lead to pages you don’t want to rank in search engines such as about us, privacy or anything that you don’t want to rank.

Robots.txt
There are pages such as member lists, calender, register, new posts…etc that must not be indexed. By not allowing spiders to index them your rankings will improve and the engines will crawl your other forum pages faster. To do this, copy and paste the following lines into your robot.txt file

User-agent: *
Disallow: /forum/ajax.php
Disallow: /forum/attachment.php
Disallow: /forum/calendar.php
Disallow: /forum/cron.php
Disallow: /forum/editpost.php
Disallow: /forum/global.php
Disallow: /forum/image.php
Disallow: /forum/inlinemod.php
Disallow: /forum/joinrequests.php
Disallow: /forum/login.php
Disallow: /forum/member.php
Disallow: /forum/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forum/misc.php
Disallow: /forum/moderator.php
Disallow: /forum/newattachment.php
Disallow: /forum/newreply.php
Disallow: /forum/newthread.php
Disallow: /forum/online.php
Disallow: /forum/poll.php
Disallow: /forum/postings.php
Disallow: /forum/printthread.php
Disallow: /forum/private.php
Disallow: /forum /profile.php
Disallow: /forum/register.php
Disallow: /forum/report.php
Disallow: /forum/reputation.php
Disallow: /forum/search.php
Disallow: /forum/sendmessage.php
Disallow: /forum /showgroups.php
Disallow: /forum/subscription.php
Disallow: /forum/threadrate.php
Disallow: /forum/usercp.php
Disallow: /forum/usernote.php

Bonus tip
Vbulletin styles by default have no external CSS files, and every time a browser requests a forum page, it reads the CSS data from the html. You should export your CSS to an external file so the forum gets faster.

To do that, make sure that /clientscript/vbulletin_css directory is chmod 777 so the stylesheet files can be created.
Next, in the AdminCP, select the vBulletin Options menu then vBulletin Options. Select Style and Language Options. Set “Store CSS Stylesheets as Files?” to Yes.
Click Submit.

Everyone will appreciate that your forum opens fast.

Off-page Optimization
Improving the on-page SEO of your forum is great, but If your site is not trusted enough in the search engines you won’t get a lot of traffic. Attracting links to your forum is quite hard and probably having a blog and some linkable content can help build links (that needs another post).

Domain age also plays an important role in ranking. I have done on-page SEO for a forum of a friend of mine who had a 2 year old domain and couple of hundreds of links and he started to receive nice traffic. I guess you get my point.

This is all of what I know about SEO for forums and I think I’ve covered the most parts that you should take care of. However, I would love to hear your feedback and comments. Please, If I missed something or you have an another point of view on something, post in the comments. Also, if you have any questions feel free to ask in comments.