installing vbSEO is like making sausage

the process is painful, bloody and ugly. But the end result is delicious.

At least I hope so. I might be a little weird, but I took a solid medium-size site (100k threads and 600k posts with 60k members) already with high SERPs that was earning upwards of 700k pageviews/month and installed vbSEO. Why? Well, I have my reasons. I just am going though a couple of painful issues with my server config spitting out some crazy text to analytics that I can't trace.

Otherwise, this process has forced me to clean up a lot of the slop that was on my server for years and to actually configure some of my parked domains properly and claim all of them properly in Google Webmaster Tools as well.

My "brand brand forum" SERPS are all coming in line and I expect them to increase my site traffic a good 20-30% alone when they all hit critical mass. A lot of that seems to come from the orderliness that vbSEO has made easier for me to get access to.

So, that's where I'm at for now. Right in the middle of grinding sausage. I'm getting hungry.

Hi Steve,

I loved your metaphor of making sausages! Fortunately several customers have found out a delicious result, just like you.

Just wanted to know in which steps did you find the vBSEO installation painful?. Maybe we can make some improvements according to your feedback.

for some reason all pages are being sent to analytics with a *.php extension. However, I think my index.php file is being rewritten as chevy-trucks.php. While it does not show to the user, it's being cached in Google for every single page as GA will ignore index.php I think, but it's showing this one.

There was also an issue with the /forum/.htaccess file, it didn't handle my parked domains properly so about 25,000 pages got cached in Google for those domains. I've got it all under control, but it's taken a lot of time over the past two weeks to get it that way.