general observations

My main one is this right now, I installed vbseo again and since I have I've watched my traffic decline.

I'm watching analytics on each day increments. Since I've installed vbseo, each day I'm seeing a pattern. This monday is 1k uniques less than last monday, which was 1k uniques less than the monday before.

Am I not being patient enough?

A dip at the beginning is expected. It can take a good 4-8 weeks to start seeing positive results.
SEO doesn't happen overnight. It's an ever on-going task.

Thanks Brian, I just want to make sure I'm doing everything correctly.

You said you installed it again if so, why did you remove it? It maybe i misunderstood. If so forget it.
Vbseo is a great tool for seo, actually it's the best one and you can better see its benefits on long term. A web site needs time to get good ranking. You'll wait at least 8 months to see how it affects and it'll better and better every week. As long as there is not any other problem with your site.

somehow along the way with upgrades and a 2nd person working on the forum with me, it got uninstalled and I'm not sure how. We also made a server move and with a site this size it got hectic. I'm sure I'll be happy with it and what I'm seeing is there is now more quality traffic and true measures instead of just a slamming of bots, etc. and thats my main goal

If you had it (vBSEO) and then you didn't and now you have it again, your URLs are changing again and again. Need to give it time for Google (and others) to reindex you. Many of your old threads might be coming up 'not found' at the moment.

Originally Posted by stanger

somehow along the way with upgrades and a 2nd person working on the forum with me, it got uninstalled and I'm not sure how. We also made a server move and with a site this size it got hectic. I'm sure I'll be happy with it and what I'm seeing is there is now more quality traffic and true measures instead of just a slamming of bots, etc. and thats my main goal

How long you used as it uninstalled? If it's for few days its ok. But weeks can hurt your rankings. Server move is big change. Your new server location maybe different country or place, your new servers ip has maybe bad history with search engine bots. Or your new server may have worser speed and resources to offer good crawliblity. You see?

Also when you block bots, you need to be careful you may block google msn yahoo etc. These bots sometimes change their ips. Accidentaly you can blogk good traffic. I recommend you cloudflare system for removing risks like bad bots and attacks. You can read my latest blog post on this matter.

In order to increase your traffic i recommend also to work on developing dofollow fresh backlinks. This is really helpful for any seo work.