Who uses the Archive? Is it worth it?

Just as the title says. I am wondering who uses the vBulletin Archive and if it's really worth it?

I recall reading a post on vb.com about a year ago that said it really wasn't that good for search engines and that it could be disabled. I ended up turning mine off in the ACP, is this a mistake? I'd be interested in seeing what the community thinks of this and what you've done on your own sites.

Cheers,
~Tex

 

Recently Wayne mentioned that it really hasn't been of any benefit since about 2005.

I'm starting to shut mine off.

 

Since mine is already indexed in Google, I don't feel comfortable removing it. I don't want to lose all of that traffic. Too bad vBulletin doesn't have a built in redirect to redirect visitors from the archive to the actual thread when the archive is disabled.

 

Search engine spiders use the archive. Not a good idea to turn it off.
There's no reason to anyway. It's not using any resources, and it's not like it's in the way.

 

Just set the archive to to go the real thread instead of the archive version. That way you do not get 2 different versions of the same thread indexed.

 

It's my understanding they can access the regular threads too, at least I thought I could confirm that when I constantly see them on my site. TBH my site only gets the people interested in that particular topic, which isn't a huge amount of people, so it's not as important to me that we're on the top of the search results. Most of the people really interested in our topic find us through the home page of the product our forum supports.

Can you or anyone else confirm if the spiders do in fact pull content from the regular threads with the archive off? Common sense tells me yes, but perhaps the archive is a tad more efficient for the spiders.

 

I use it to browse on my PSP... I don't actually post with my PSP unless I absolutely have too (it's so hard to do ).

 

I shut ours off a long time ago, didn't like the duplicate content and the bots scan our real post just fine.
It's a waste IMHO

 

I've left it enabled on my main board only because it's been there since the beginning and is already indexed. However on fresh installs the first thing I disable is the archive and forum jump menu, which generates a lot of useless HTML.

 

They probably do. I just find that the spiders index the archive urls quicker than the post urls.

I could very well be wrong, but this is what I think I'm seeing on my forums.

 

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

I actually turned mine off about a year after installing the forum. I think I'd rather just do without it, even though it's "partially" indexed. Thanks again everyone! :cheers:

Thanks Peggy, I think you're right there. At least it makes sense to me.

 

I have it turned on on my board for search engine purposes, but I don't use it.

 

What do you guys do for smartphone users? Most folks that browse my sites via smartphones use the archive/pda version.

 

I have a mobile skin installed and when someone visits the site from a mobile device it forces the mobile skin.