Thumbs up for vbseo. I was one of the early consultants on the vbseo team.
But more than vbseo, for SEO purposes you need some template changes to give the pages a good h1 and opening paragraph
- see on this forum how there is a formula generated opening paragraph using the thread and forum titles (I have highlighted these as "
red")
"This is a discussion on
Essential vBulletin Plugins / Hacks within the
Forum Management forums, part of the
Webmaster Discussion category; Which plugins hacks do you recommend? A few of my favourites are: vBulletin SEO by vBSEO Check Proxy RBL on"
This was part of a hack that I showcased way back in 2004
vBulletin-Search Engine Optimize vBulletin-top hack
And yes, its that much easier when you use the vbseo toolkit that lets you create variables to equate to the above.
You can use the above logic to create a meta description.
I do the same for forum pages. While you generally have the forum name in the description, in case you don't, you can use a formula in the template to create that opening paragraph of forum title, some general intro text, then the forum description.
From an SEO perspective, I have issues with the standard treatment of vbulletin pagination. Page 2 onwards competes with page 1 to get ranked for the thread or forum. Therefore I have a conditional in the template that adds <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" /> for page 2 onwards. This means that Google is not indexing the pages, but following the links on the pages. No more competition for page one, and yet all links on other pages are followed and found.
Yes, such a method sux for people wanting sig links from page 2 onwards, but its ideal for ranking thread and forum pages properly.