SEO Friendly Forum Software?

[blacknight]

Which forum software are people using these days which is seo friendly out of the box?

I love VBSEO, but just wanted to see what else is out there

I had a look at vanilla a while back, but the seo mods weren't that great

[bizhat]

I don't know if there any seo friendly forum out of the box. It will be great forum software have SEO url enabled by default.

phpBB have free seo mod, i used it for many of my forums. I checked vanilla some time back, but never like it.

[Cormac]

BBPress is excellently SEO'd out of the box. Clean URLs, Tags, Latest Posts on Homepage, Pagination, Uses CSS over Tables for Layout, Solid Page Title Structures, OS Development so Plugins are freely available, and more...(I presume).

Demo - bbPress support forums

I'm going to get into BBPress for a site fairly soon. I haven't used it in over a year but the guys are nearing their 1.0 release fairly soon so I expect things to kick off for them.

[caminowebmaster]

BN is VBSEO worth it?

I have a small but busy forum and the cost seems a bit high? Do you get more traffic from search results?

Thanks

[blacknight]

Originally Posted by caminowebmaster

BN is VBSEO worth it?

I have a small but busy forum and the cost seems a bit high? Do you get more traffic from search results?

Thanks

VBseo is worth every cent

[gav240z]

Well I have used phpbb2 and phpbb3 and SMF (Simple Machines Forum). None of which do an excellent job at being SEO friendly.

I think of all the forums, VB is probably the easiest to make SEO friendly.

I am about to launch a website with inbuilt forum that should be very SE friendly simply because it will be missing half the useless functions most forum software programs come with.

I think generally speaking forums only provide small value to search engine results and if you want your website to be found you need to add something like indepth articles and reviews etc.. to really grow in search results.

There are of course exceptions to the rule, but for the most part I'm not too worried about search engine friendly forums on my own websites.

[n3tFl0w]

Originally Posted by Cormac

BBPress is excellently SEO'd out of the box. Clean URLs, Tags, Latest Posts on Homepage, Pagination, Uses CSS over Tables for Layout, Solid Page Title Structures, OS Development so Plugins are freely available, and more...(I presume).

Demo - bbPress support forums

I'm going to get into BBPress for a site fairly soon. I haven't used it in over a year but the guys are nearing their 1.0 release fairly soon so I expect things to kick off for them.

Thank you very much for pointing this out! Exactly what I was looking for... for my next idiotic project.

[blacknight]

The Movable Type Pro system includes a forum option, which might work ... I have to have a look into how it handles the templates

[Cormac]

Originally Posted by n3tFl0w

Thank you very much for pointing this out! Exactly what I was looking for... for my next idiotic project.

Glad to be of service. There aren't too many themes but Justin Tadlock recently created a theme portal which has a section for BBPress - Theme Hybrid: A WordPress theme club - Some other sites that are worth a poke for BBPress themes are bbPress Themes | bbPress Plugins + Available bbPress Themes bbPress Showcase + Bbpress themes bbPress support forums

[defeated]

I've just installed the SMF forum and it is far away from being SEO friendly! Having had my site problem free for the last while I'm suddenly getting duplicate title tags, short meta description warnings and even a 404 not found error in google webmaster tools! I also need to create a sitemap for it which is going to be a problem for me.
The structure of the site is beyond my understanding at this point so making changes is hard.
In the case of the short meta descriptions, the reason is that it uses the page title for the description. It's going to take me weeks to figure out how to change that.
Appart from SEO problems it seems to be fairly good but I have nothing to compare it with.
Ian.