vBulletin bad SEO?

[dezinerite]

I've had a vBulletin forum for a little over 6 months now and SEO is just killer tough. It almost feels like an anti-seo forum software. I'm using a free vbseo tool from vbulletin.org, and I've got a sitemap. Google, Yahoo, etc. bots are crawling all the time.

But nothing ever ends up on Google unless I social bookmark that page (which I don't really want to have to do for each and every page).

I'm not using seo-friendly urls yet, could that be the only problem?

I have almost 2000 threads, but only around 400 pages indexed on Google.

I'd be very grateful for some advice, thanks.:hearts:

 

[Keral_Patel]

Google does index the Non SEO friendly URL's created by vBulletin.

If you have 400 pages indexed out of 2000 then it is great.

Namepros has 84,200 pages indexed out of 200,000 atleast.

 

[Miami-Mike]

Use google friendly URLs and custom titles. I'm sure that your search engine traffic will increase for about 30-100%

 

[HFear]

Unlike Wordpress sites, it takes time for forum pages to get indexed. I would recommend also giving vBSEO (vBSEO - vBulletin SEO) a try, although it's expensive it's worth it. It makes your URL's and titles more friendly and gives you a lot of other search engine options. If you plan on signing up with vbSEO be sure to PM me, you can sign up using my referral link.

 

[wussadotcom]

Use SE friendly links like namepros and other major sites. I am not that sure that it will help the indexing ratio but for SERP ranking it surely does which means more visitors. By the way, namepros has 120K index pages :p site:www.namepros.com - Google Search

 

[McDot]

vBulletin with vbSEO works fine, is the best I know and certainly worth the money! I only started a small forum a few days ago and the forum got indexed two days later. All new pages are indexed within a couple of hours.

 

[Rumait]

Use search engine friendly URLs

 

[angilina]

I think that Vbulletin forums are better than the rest of forum scripts. I have a forum with MyBB script. I made many many changes in the script to make it SEO friendly. If I had to do these changes for a new forum of mine with MyBB, then it may take me days to do all these changes.

Google do not mind much about the URL structure. There are Vbulletin forums where Google index the unfriendly URLs in SERPs every minute.

I suggest you make changes and try to take care of duplicate problem that is caused by different URls pointing to the same page.