SEO Question

Roach

Active member
I was talking about Xenforo with a forum owner who owns an Xenforo license and I was considering buying Xenforo soon and moving my currently small soccer forum over to it. Although that user said that the Xenforo SEO level is not even up to the level of phpBB's yet. This may or may not be a false statement but I would like to know, how good is Xenforo's SEO (I know it is not at the level of vB SEO yet) but how good is it? and what can be done to make it better?
 
Based on my use and stats, the SEO is virtually perfect....that is, the forums represent the underlying content almost perfectly.

Type in a rare query - in this case for a wood stove long discontinued:
fisher grandpa bear

and you'll see my hearth.com/talk forum come right up.

Try another:
vigilant wood stove

and the forums are the third link down.

I do think it is good to use sub-forums with proper titles for very relevant sections of your site. Notice how I did that with the Fisher stoves, a very popular collectors item. My guess is that helps with the rankings on goog.

But, basically, I think XF does not get in the way of SEO...which is really the main idea here!
 
I would very much like to know what exactly leads your friend to that opinion. From what I understand and have seen the xenForo SEO (built in) is actually pretty good. Everyone thinks SEO when they consider page rankings but SEO only goes so far with search engines like Google. It's about content. Quality content will rank higher than crappy content.

I would dare say the xenForo SEO is actually superior to vB SEO.
 
SEO is certainly not overhyped. I have experience with all major forum software and I can tell that out of the box XenForo's SEO is better than its competitors.

- IPB has history of bad SEO. I am an active member of an IPB board and the admin there admitted that the SEO of his board is not very good. Apparently IPS addressed the SEO issues in recent IPB versions, but I haven't seen a single post from an IPB customer that confirmed that the SEO of IPB got better.

- vB's SEO is only good with vbSEO, which costs $149, more than a XenForo license.

- WBB's SEO is good, but it needs a SEO plugin.

- phpBB just sucks as a software and should be avoided.

- MyBB has bad SEO + a tabled design. There is a free SEO plugin that does the job well in making friendly URLs, but you have to manually tweak the HTML with heading tags and such.

- SMF, pretty much like MyBB SEO wise.

So I would say SEO wise XF is your best bet.
 
SEO is certainly not overhyped. I have experience with all major forum software and I can tell that out of the box XenForo's SEO is better than its competitors.

- IPB has history of bad SEO. I am an active member of an IPB board and the admin there admitted that the SEO of his board is not very good. Apparently IPS addressed the SEO issues in recent IPB versions, but I haven't seen a single post from an IPB customer that confirmed that the SEO of IPB got better.

- vB's SEO is only good with vbSEO, which costs $149, more than a XenForo license.

- WBB's SEO is good, but it needs a SEO plugin.

- phpBB just sucks as a software and should be avoided.

- MyBB has bad SEO + a tabled design. There is a free SEO plugin that does the job well in making friendly URLs, but you have to manually tweak the HTML with heading tags and such.

- SMF, pretty much like MyBB SEO wise.

So I would say SEO wise XF is your best bet.
And that is good SEO in the core? Without any file edits ect...?
 
XF doesn't need a SEO plugin because it's already implemented in the core + uses SEO important heading tags in the HTML. For most users a vanilla installation suffices for good SEO. But don't make a mistake about it, perfect SEO doesn't exist. You can always tweak things if you believe that it's better.
 
XF doesn't need a SEO plugin because it's already implemented in the core + uses SEO important heading tags in the HTML. For most users a vanilla installation suffices for good SEO. But don't make a mistake about it, perfect SEO doesn't exist. You can always tweak things if you believe that it's better.
Thanks for the information :)

Spend your Time on the Content, and google will find you.
Posting of decent content is still helping with SEO, I know what. But it is the way your forum software is programmed to help that happen faster. I know Google will find my site but I wanted to know how good it was.
 
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