[Forum] What is the Archive for?

[Mermaid]

I cannot work out the point of the Archive link, it just seems to be the forum index but without the style? And it seems to cause duplicate content.

Can it be disabled? Or is there a valid reason for it?

[Andy]

I think it was developed a long time ago in an effort to aid search engines index forums. As far as I know it became obsolete (not needed) years ago.

Yes it could actually penalize you for duplicate content. At any rate you certainly don't want to enable it.

I hope vB5 will be eliminating many obsolete and seldom used functions like this.

[Ace]

Really? Content unique to your site being found by 2 different URLs is Duplicate Content, and could result in Google penalties? (No, it's not. It can be an example of bad link consensus, but it's not Dupe Content).

How about the FAQ that probably 99% of forums don't change?

[Andy]

Really? Content unique to your site being found by 2 different URLs is Duplicate Content, and could result in Google penalties? (No, it's not. It can be an example of bad link consensus, but it's not Dupe Content).

How about the FAQ that probably 99% of forums don't change?

Actually Google calls it non-malicious duplicate content.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

At any rate it's not needed and there's nothing worse than Google indexing your archive as it makes reading the content very difficult.

[Mermaid]

Really? Content unique to your site being found by 2 different URLs is Duplicate Content, and could result in Google penalties? (No, it's not. It can be an example of bad link consensus, but it's not Dupe Content).

How about the FAQ that probably 99% of forums don't change?

I don't think it's so much a question of a site being penalised for duplicate content, rather duplicate pages may well show lower in a search result than one unique page. Obviously unchanged forum FAQs would have this problem, but it really wouldn't matter as I doubt any site owner would care that their FAQ doesn't show up in a search.