Forum Archives and SEO

Does having the forum archive enabled with the footer links in vbulletin effect your SEO negatively? I have read a lot of people saying it is bad and is classed as duplicate content, what are your thoughts about this?

 

Duplicate content is a myth.

That said, the Archive will most likely become your default indexed pages in a search engine due to the lighter code and heavier keyword density. This can have a negative impact on new visitors to your site.

 

Thanks Wayne, we have always had ours turned off. Thats the thing, on Googles report a site it allows you to check a box for Duplicate sites or pages, are they two different things duplicate content and duplicate pages?

 

Duplicate content within your site brings no penalties unless you're doing that content specifically for the spider. That is called cloaking. If your archive automatically rerouted to the standard page if it wasn't a spider, you would have a problem.

Read and learn:
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Demystifying the "duplicate content penalty"

I just disable it personally. it has no real benefit after 2005.

 

Thanks for that, that has wrapped up all of my duplicate content questions in a few paragraphs. So basically they dont mind unless its done deliberately for bad purposes like stealing/cloning sites etc, seems like any past worries over duplicate content of mine are now gone

 

Isnt this like the Google Myth Thread posted elsewhere?

 

If that were the case, what's stopping an owner from making a blog with 100 post of the exact same thing and expecting all pages to rank well and get indexed?
Here are is a video and link to better understand things.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niINTKXT-zs"]YouTube - SMX Seattle: Matt Cutts on Duplicate Content and Paid Search[/ame]
Matt Cutts on duplicate

I think we all know it's best to have unique content on our sites.
I personally disable to archives, I would rather guest/spiders see teh actual threads and post of my forum, vs a text only version. Whenever I search for things and come up on someone archive, I always go to the actual thread because you're going to miss items in the archive like images or videos, that you will see in the actual threads.
If you have a valid lite style, you shouldn't have a problem getting it indexed, and indexed well. :doh:

just my two cents

 

Google does not penalize for having duplicate contents as long as they belong to the same domain. It only filters out results coming from the same domain when displaying the search results.