On-site seo considerations

[Mark.B]

You can't remove it completely. You may be able to rename it, but this wouldn't be supported.
It is there by design.....it identifies the content type and is therefore entirely valid.

/blogs
/social-groups
/articles
/forum

People get very hung up about this for absolutely no reason. It only looks odd on sites like this which are historically installed in a sub-folder called "forum", hence you get a double "forum" in the URL. It does not hurt SEO by being there. SEO is overrated anyway, Google will index what it wants to index and no amount of trickery and URL manipulation will make a massive difference to that.

[derek201]

For this forum site, not a lot of effort is put into SEO optimization. In fact, I don't think anyone actively does anything for SEO. Customers can adjust their URLS as they see fit by editing the pages of their sites.

Would this mean, that I can delete the "/forum" part from all the pages of the website? I guess I could do something like deleting the "/forum", and leaving, /blogs, /articles, and /groups. This will be used too, but forum is the most important part, and the "/forum" element does not seem to be very needed, in my case.

[Wayne Luke]

For this forum site, not a lot of effort is put into SEO optimization. In fact, I don't think anyone actively does anything for SEO. Customers can adjust their URLS as they see fit by editing the pages of their sites.

[derek201]

The /forum/forum is a sideffect of the site being in a folder called forum.

I was going to edit that now. Since there is /blogs, /articles, and /groups, it is probably ok.

[Zachery]

The /forum/forum is a sideffect of the site being in a folder called forum.

[derek201]

vbulletin.com/forum/forum/vbulletin-sales-and-feedback/site-feedback

I think that the above url, would be better like this:

vbulletin.com/vbulletin-sales-and-feedback/site-feedback
vbulletin.com/vbulletin-sales-and-feedback/site-feedback/4323159-on-site-seo-considerations

"/forum/forum" is not needed, I would say. Actually there is /forum, /blogs, /articles, so /forum can be good, but two "/forum" elements, are not needed, for sure.

[derek201]

I would say that urls are too long, although it is good to have url structure, and keywords in urls, for seo, and also /forum element, after the main domain name is not needed. I think that this displays as something like this too: domain-name.com/forum/forum/forum-name/post-name. The first forum is something like /blog, which is assigned by a webmaster, when he or she places vBulletin as a subfolder of the site.

1) URLs should be shorter, well it probably does not make sense to change it now.

2) The /forum part, which is always there, needs to be removed. It should not be there, it does not help in anything, and it does not look good.

Also, related to this, it should be possible to add custom titles to any pages of a vBulletin site (at least the main section, I would not be talking about every single post, lets say), and also meta tags like noidex, follow. Something along the lines of Seo by Yoast plugin for Wordpress. I've read about many websites, which upgraded from vBulletin 4 to vBulletin 5, and lost a lot of search engine traffic, because of this.

On-site seo is an important thing, as most of the websites on the Internet, get most of their traffic from search. If this is affected, software can be considered, as not good. If everything is 100% good with this, the website is growing faster, if this is affected, what seems to be the case now, it is a big obstacle to search engine traffic.

So, please look into on-site seo, as far as vBulletin 5, and any further releases of the program. This is very important, for any type of software, which gets used as a website, on the Net.