Getting the best out of vbSEO

Back in December last year I started my site, so one year on I am in the process of doing a review and looking at all the statistics and information available to me.

One of the things I have been looking at is the effectiveness of vbSEO (which was installed mid May this year).

Before I get started there are two things I have to say. Firstly I have found vbSEO, its support team, its community and everything that surrounds it to be more than I had hoped for and is a beacon in the myriad paid vBulletin modifications where support could be described as somewhat lacking. The second thing is that I am more than happy to accept that what follows is incorrect and down to me misinterpreting the data available to me.

However (you knew this was coming)....

I am not sure of the effectiveness of the application or possibly my configuration of it (which is 99% default settings). Take the following graphs taken from Google Analytics (The red bar more or less marks vbSEO install date this was added by hand so isn't accurate to the very day, also ignore the dip in August as this was due to Analytics code being accidentally removed for a few days):

Absolutely Unique Visitors (01.01.08 - 10.12.08)


Page Views for all visitors (01.01.08 - 10.12.08)


Visitors Overview (01.01.08 - 10.12.08)


Visits for all visitors (01.01.08 - 10.12.08)


As you can see there is no real/exceptional difference to the stats pre & post vbSEO install. I have seen others post similar graphs with almost cliff like climbs after installing vbSEO, however for some reason this is not the case for me.

Then there is something else I have noticed, the volume of search engine traffic seems to be dropping as well:

Search Engine Referrals (01.01.08 - 10.12.08)


As you can see there is a pick-up in referrals after install, however this seems to follow the natural climb that was occurring anyway and as you can see since the end of September there has been a steady decline.

I also use the sitemap generator addon to submit to all the search engines it supports. Until around September this was running on default settings I then followed this tutorial/advice (and changed the sitemap settings no other vbseo settings were changed), the sitemap settings described here resulted in an drop from 70k Google indexed pages to 10k which was accompanied by the start of the drop you can see in the last graph above, so after a month I reverted back to defaults. As you can see from the graph above and I am still recovering from that. Again I am not ranting at the tutorial/advice, it obviously works for some but not for me.

I am also using the conditional signatures modification and have followed most of the guidance here.

Please do not get me wrong, this is not a rant, whinge or a complaint. More an observation and an honest request for advice. Although my site is modified a little it does not deviate very far away from the vast majority of other vBulletin sites. Obviously vbSEO works for many people but right now, and assuming I have interpreted the statistics correctly, it doesn't seem to be working for me.

For obvious reasons I am extremely keen to get everything possible out of vbSEO, so over to you guys. Where do I go with this?

Quality > Quantity.

My sitemap settings remove all the junk. Yes, you'll probably have less pages indexed, but the ones that are will hold more weight.

When you change rewrite settings, you basically start over from day 1. I made that clear in the article that if you are already indexed, that it's probably not a good idea to use those settings.

So, you went from stock vb to vbseo default to mine back to vbseo default.

You're effectively changed your serp pages 5 times. Google takes time to get things straight.

My honest opinion is to use my settings file and my sitemap settings and don't do anything else for 3 months.

My apologies, I should have been clearer, the settings that were changed were the sitemap settings. There have been no changes to vbSeo setup since the original install back in May.

As for quality/quantity, I am more than happy to be corrected here however, I am under the impression that Google will only index what it thinks to be relevant changing inclusions/exclusions isn't going to effect the decision they make. So if you throw everything at them they will remove what they think to be irrelevant so you get maximum coverage. In addition to this if I have 100k pages indexed and that is made up of 40k quality and 60k dross, does the 60k dross actually make any difference, the 40k quality items are there anyway and you never know, somebody might search for the dross.

Please do not misinterpret what I am saying here, I am trying really hard here to not make these posts not sound like rants, complaints or accusatory. As mention in the thread opener I just need some good advice.

have you posted your site for a critique?

There's 1000 other things that could be effecting you besides your sitemap settings.

invalid code, graphic heavy, no headings, or just in general an overall lack of good content that people are searching for.

have you played with google trends?

find some keywords in your niche, and write some articles about them.