Your results in Google are plummeting. vB5 is horrible for SEO.

[Zachery]

This topic is EXPLICITLY about vBulletin 5, and over 2 years old. Please open a new topic if you'd like to discuss changes to your url structure in an upgrade from one version to another.

[Mark.B]

Any of the URL structures that were available in a default vB4, will redirect to their equivalent vB5 URLs.

If you were using vbSEO on vB4, then these URLs will not redirect. vBSEO was a third party company which ceased trading. We wouldn't ever build in redirection from a third party product's URLs. It wouldn't be possible anyway, since vBSEO allowed you to define your own URL structures, to a degree.

You may be able to redirect old vBSEO URLs to their vB4 equivalents, which in turn should redirect to vB5 URLs.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130122...all-vbseo-238/

[Mark.B]

As with all these things, there are limited resources which have to be deployed to best benefit. The number of customers who would want to rewrite the default vB5 URLs is tiny, and the development time required to do it would be huge. It's completely non-viable. Most customers just don't care about URL structures. Many browsers now don't even show them, they mask everything after the domain. Users just click links and don't care *at all* how neat / tidy / well formed they are. And the whole "pretty URLs is good for SEO" thing these days is little more than a marketing scam by SEO "experts" who charge you a fortune to "optimize" your site.

[donald1234]

While it is desirable to have keywords in the URL that are relevant to what the thread is about, I am not sure that 301 redirects are the best way to achieve this as they put unnecessary pressure on the server and leak link juice.

Vbulletin 4 seems to achieve this to a certain degree without rewriting with advanced friendly URL's. Is that feature not available with VB 5?

[Mark.B]

vBulletin 5 only has one URL setting.

[Mark.B]

Again VB doesn't listen to its base which is why so many are still on vB4. If losing market share is the goal then I guess they are on the right path.

Users with vBSEO make up a tiny, tiny proportion of the overall userbase. It would not be remotely cost effective to start coding the core software to suit a third party add on, especially one where the company who developed it went bust. This sort of thing was always a risk with using third party products - it can stop your upgrade path dead. Has been that way since vB1.

There is also absolutely no need for multiple different URL structures in the modern age. Just causes overhead, slows development time, and leaves a lot of things able to go wrong.

[Zachery]

This is actually pretty important to customers mrmckoy, however it has not yet been implemented: http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBV-4528

Vote on it if you think its important, leave your comments in the bug itself.

[Brad Padgett]

I just wanted to leave this thread with a comment, since it got started back up again.

Vbulletin 5 is awesome for SEO. There is a sitemap that works great and I have gotten great google results.

I used to be on the 1st page with only typing "cloud modding" in yahoo. That's a very general term to be on the first page. Just saying. Complainers....

[DisasterDotCom]

Sitemap doesn't necessarily work great. There's a bug in the software that prevents certain larger sitemaps from being generated, so I have to manually run the sitemap generator from AdminCP every day... getting REALLY old after 5 months... http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBV-13548

[Maltair]

So far upon upgrading from vb3 to vb5, I am experiencing the opposite - forum traffic has gone up almost six fold (6X more people logged on, from average thirty people logged on to over two hundred logged on at same time). Most are guests so who knows who they are, but they can't all be Google robots!

[Maltair]

It is odd, although I have more people logged on to my site at any given moment than before the hard numbers from sitemeter and alexa do indicate a major drop since the vb5 upgrade.

[Maltair]

The people are not due to social sharing whatever you mean by that - these are people logged onto my site. On average, I have many more people logged onto my site than before. But who knows, maybe they are the same users because average daily unique visitors and page views as logged by Alexa and sitemeter are down about 65%.

One possible explanation is that all my vb3 backlinks that had been posted by fans out there are now dead URLs, although I do have the dead links direct to a page that explains that the content is still there but must be searched for.

[fionix]

fionix Digitalpoint is Xenforo as is Cpanel. They were upset by vbulletin's decision not to allow a hook system into vb5 which made the best mods from vb4 unreproducible. Also many of the great mod makers went to xenforo. That's what one of the execs at cpanel told me. We've been friends for many years now.

ohhh. I didn't know that... the guys at Digitial Point are very hardcore for coding I guess. Becuase switching from 1 forum software to another is for sure not easy!

[Maltair]

Hmm ok Maltair, so have you checked google webmaster tools? Do you have more or less pages indexed and are you ranked high in the listings? With the archive being gone you should have less members but if you check the "rankings" in webmaster tools it will tell you place each keyword world list in the results.

I have Google Analytics installed but don't really bother with it. I go by sitemeter and Alexa.

[g00gl3r]

A point of order- we also switched from https to http during the VB5 upgrade, for a more accurate number your google query should be: site:www.vbulletin.com

Which would include both results.

325,000 results! - That's a massive from from 2.5 million.

[Müller Markus]

I can Confirm The Google Indexing Of Vbulletin Is Horribe :/