Question

Hope someone will give me a hand with this problem I have. So here it goes.

There is a website with integrated vBulletin forum inside. The forum is accessible through
https://site.de/forum domain. The main site itself has many other domains based on locale. That is to say, there is a https://site.ch, https://site.it, https://site.at, etc (each one is in corresponding language).

Now there is a need to have this forum under at least 2 of this additional domains. I mean, there should be https://site.ch/forum domain, wich will contain the same forum, but with some differences in style and, of course, will have working inside-forum links with it’s own domain (site.ch). The whole system is to be SEO-ed also.

So now my question is how to achieve this? I know there are some sort of plugins to manage multi-domain access, but they are not supported and are still in beta version.

At first, how to setup the forum to work under multiple domains?

And then, maybe I need to manually change some code to set the $vbulletin->options['bburl'] that is used to generate the links inside forum?

And the last one, how do I make all this search engine optimized??

Answer 1

You’re asking numerous questions, you might get better results if you created a separate question for each of:

1) How to use one forum directory for multiple domains? (with the vbulletin tag and the tag for the web server you are using)

2) How to set the language based on the current domain in vbulletin? (with the vbulletin tag and one or more of these tags: localized, locale, multi-language, multilanguage)

3) Best practices for duplicate content presented in multiple languages on multiple domains (with the seo and vbulletin tags)

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Some Answers:

1) If you’re using the apache web server, you could add something like this to your httpd.conf file:

Alias /forums /var/www/...xxx.../forum_directory // use the path to your forum directory, no trailing slash

<Directory /var/www/...xxx.../forum_directory>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Then in the vbulletin ACP, change the setting for your basepath URL to “No”:
Admin Control Panel -> Site Name / URL / Contact Details -> Always use Forum URL as Base Path

2) There are a few plugins that detect the language used by the browser and set vBulletin to use that language:
Language Detection
Set forum-language automatic to browser-language for first-time-visitors

3) SEO covers many things, but to deal with having duplicate content on multiple domains you can look at the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

This posting is helpful:
Working with multi-regional websites

A section from the post: Dealing with duplicate content on global websites

Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible for all pages and variations from the start. There is generally no need to “hide” the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a “noindex” robots meta tag. However, if you’re providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both “example.de/” and “example.com/de/” show German language content for users in Germany), it would make sense to choose a preferred version and to redirect (or use the “rel=canonical” link element) appropriately.

I don’t have anything on the other search engines.