Getting discussion board into Google

[Jon12345]

I have a busy discussion forum with over 12,000 members and 140,000 posts. It is great for return visitors but I want to use it to help get more traffic from the search engines, especially Google.

The forum software I use is vbulletin.

How can I use this forum to generate new traffic from Google?

Thanks,

Jon

[Giacomo]

Jon12345,

I think you should post this question in VBulletin's support forum.

[Jon12345]

Well, I know I can make it indexable. But will this get me penalized in Google? Or will it increase my traffic?

[Giacomo]

Making your discussion board indexable should not get you penalized at all; on the contrary, it should increase your traffic: WebmasterWorld docet. ;)

[glenv]

There are some AWESOME hacks on VBulletin.org that do exactly what you are looking for.

Here are my stats for my VBBS:
Members: 6,659, Threads: 7,282, Posts: 36,700

I installed one of these hacks that indexed my VBBS and after the last dance I have 5000 plus threads indexed as pages. It dynamically creates your pages so they appear normal with meta tags individualized for each thread. Just awesome....

One thing that makes me nervous is if this could get someone in trouble with Google? I hope not! I do not consider it spamming. All og my links are quality posts with different offers. Not just general forum discussions.

Any input from the pros?

[Giacomo]

I cannot think of a single reason why Google should penalize you for making your discussion board more Google-friendly. ;)

[Yidaki]

>One thing that makes me nervous is if this could get
>someone in trouble with Google? I hope not! I do not
>consider it spamming.

Nope, it's far away from spamming. Allthough a clear definition of spam is still pending, i would say that opening the doors for google to grant access to a nice readable forum (without SID's, loops etc.) is all but not spamming. I feel that google even indexes more and more forums. The last weeks i did a lot of very specific searches and found the best info within the top 5 results - most of them were experts forums. I appreciate those results!

Jon12345, you should definitely check the VBB support forums!

[danielm]

Wait for vbulletin 3, which will come out "soon". (It's been in private beta for a few weeks now). It includes an archive link at the bottom of the page, which is essentially for search engine robots. It is fully Google-spiderable, as it is working for the vBulletin board - so as long as you have enough pagerank for the depth, Google will go to it.

I'm impatiently waiting myself for the next version, but instead of fretting, I'm trying to build the board content / discussions so that when it does get spidered - bam! Lot more search engine results. ;-)

[Jesse_Smith]

:::How can I use this forum to generate new traffic from Google?

Get rid of the session ID part of the URL. I did that and BANG, 1,860 links added in the last dance! You can also put up the 'vB Easy Archive v2.4' hack. It makes an archive where it looks like the threads, posts, and boards are all .html.