How long has your forum been live?
Are you using Friendly URLs?
Is your niche competitive? Are any sites in that niche linking to yours? vice versa...
I am not a SEO expert and have not launched a forum yet, but I am guessing that vanilla is structured very well.
My guess is that you need to focus on content and popularity.
Best of luck....
Hunch tells me that vanilla will outperform other forums for the same reason many google results seem to prefer the lo-fi versions of a thread from that other forum software company.
Yeah, Google loves my Vanilla forum. My discussion community use to use a heavily mod'd phpBB. I worked very hard to make it SEO, and eventually got a PR4. Google ate up the site, but it rarely updated its index of topics.. And it wasn't very keyword effective.
Since my switch to Vanilla, Google practically rapes my site. Having all of the discussions in the root has helped. Like WallPhone said, I think Google likes it because keywords are more dense since you don't have so much statistics and other crap on your pages.
However, one thing about Vanilla is that you don't have as much interlinking... So Google doesn't seem to value your discussions as much (because PR gets evenly spread across your Vanilla.). Might be able to solve that with extensions like featured posts, popular posts, random, related, etc.
we need a sitemap.xml generator for vanilla like this for wordpress:
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final
And TAGS - Google Love Tags
I use this to create sitemaps for my sites. Depending on the updating of the site I run it either once a week or once a month and resubmit the sitemap.xml in google sitemaps. Works a treat.
A google sitemaps extension would rock hard though.
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A google sitemaps extension would rock hard though.