http://www.vbforums.com/archive/index.php/
What's the purpose of this?
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http://www.vbforums.com/archive/index.php/
What's the purpose of this?
In principle it's supposed to help vBulletin sites rank better on search engines. In reality it's useless.
When you google for stuff it is what comes up as the links...
Yes, they tend to outrank the actual thread pages because of their simple design. I think that was the intention.
They may not be completely useless, but I don't really see the purpose.
They are archives. Part of the purpose is to "roll off" old forum information onto another compture to 'archive' them. We don't get rid of old posts, so we really don't do archiving for the sake of 'archiving'.
I believe that the reason we leave them up is because search engine spiders can navigate the archive pages easier than the standard pages. This let's your forum posts get found easier by search engines. And everyone knows being found by the search engines is a good, good, good thing ;)
Brad!
Static HTML links are infinitely more search engine bot friendly than the dynamic links the forum uses. Their purpose is strictly to improve search engine ranking.