I just don't know

I've spent lots of time now with vbseo, and I still can't say whether it has helped one little bit in generating more traffic to our site.

There always seems to be something--some new update needed to keep up with vbulletin, some errors generated by sitemap, inconsistent indexing of pages by google, page ranks that are pitiful.

I can't imagine having less desirable results if I didn't use vbseo at all. And certainly many huge and popular sites never used vbseo or thought of using it.

So what's the point, really? Are there any verifiable statistics that this thing really helps? Common sense suggests to me that google is now smart enough to properly index pages generated dynamically, with URLs containing question marks and all, and all this "this-page-is-really-cool.html" stuff really adds up to a lot of overhead that doesn't help page rankings one small bit.

Today, for example, I did a "site:mysite" search on google, and came up with this:

Results 1 - 10 of about 46,300

Now, I know our site has had hundreds of thousand of pages indexed previously, and now it's down to 46,000!??? I suspect this is because of the "errors" that suddently the sitemap plugin you provide has generated--errors, I understand, that are to be fixed in the next release of sitemap.

And meanwhile, we're penalized by google by having the search engine drop pages?

I'm just not sure....

Hi Jay - I come with good news for you.

Firstly, we need to focus on the most important statistic to evaluate your results: search hits. If you did not see growth in your search hits while running vBSEO, that is very surprising, so I can understand your confusion now.

Let's first figure out what your traffic trend has been since you installed? Please check Google Analytics for traffic from keywords from search. Check out this article if you are not familiar with the basics of your long tail stats:
http://www.vbseo.com/blogs/joe-ward/...long-tail-146/

Ignoring the "site:" search, have your search hits increased over time?

Regarding your indexing stats, please be careful how you interpret these results. Having lots of pages indexed is certainly a goal, if they are all unique and valuable content. However, there are still some things to keep in mind:

• Google is not giving you an accurate indication of how many pages are indexed with the "site:" parameter. It jumps around and cannot be trusted as accurate.
  
  • What you should use it for is "trending". Over time, we do expect the average report to increase, but it sometimes jumps around so much that even the average may be skewed some much in either a positive or negative direction that it's hard to interpret.
  • Don't worry about these stats so much, as long as you are getting actual search traffic (and more of it over time).
  
  
• Even with the long tail, some pages will not rank. You know the type of "Hello World" or very generic topics that have very little chance of ranking against more competitive niche sites.
  
  • Those pages will be casualties of "being general", but not to worry since you still have a huge content base to deliver long tail results. This type of content is so far down the tail that it might yield only a few hits per year.
  
  
• If you check your stats and see that more different pages are getting hits than a past time, then you know that your indexed page count is growing and improving its ranking.

All that in short is: Don't focus on the results of "site:". Focus on the number of search hits you are getting.

We don't focus on the visible Google toolbar PageRank. While we like it to increase (and it does) for general marketing purposes and as an "indication" of growing link value, it is somewhat cosmetic.

It does not accurately represent the values used in Google's ranking algorithm.

However, we do focus on link value, and that is what will ultimately help you gain more traffic. To really start to see your link value or visible Toolbar page rank take off, then you definitely need to build as many quality inbound links from external sites as you can, and then you'll start getting the results you'll want. There are also some internal changes and vBSEO optimizations that you can make, that I'll address in a moment.

Google is always trying to improve, and it will get better with time. It could always index dynamic pages, doing an ok job navigating the tangled mess that most CMS systems created from the SEO perspective. But basic indexing and link consensus are world's apart! The power of 1-URL-Per-Resource is so universally overlooked it's almost un-imaginable in this post Web 2.0 world. Even Google's new canonical METAs are a good hint, but do not have all the advantages that true application level link consensus as provided by vBSEO can offer. Don't get discouraged. It's not the keywords and .html endings that are delivering the biggest value. It's the link consensus.

Sitemap Errors

If you are getting an actual error with your sitemap, please open a support ticket to get help from the team.

If you are getting Google Webmaster Tools diagnostic messages, you can post them here for discussion.

Your sitemaps are the best way to alert new content to Google, but even if you deleted them forever, I would not expect dropped pages. I would expect slower indexing, but not a loss in pages or traffic.

Unless your actual search traffic has taken a sudden large drop, it's extremely unlikely that you have incurred any form of penalty.

Some really great news is that I've examined your forum quickly and I think there are lots of opportunities for improvement and tweaks that might help accelerate you a little bit faster.

If you open a critique request, I'll let you know what those opportunities are, and we can do a review that might help detect any issues you are having that are not evident right at the moment.

Please create a new critique thread and I'll try to do a detailed review for you by tomorrow Jay. I'm sure we can get you back on track.

Remember to post your traffic trend. Has it been growing, reducing, or staying approximately the same since installing vBSEO? If you want to post your long tail stats and/or your search hits graph, that would be helpful.