Is this normal? vBSEO Results

Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? Here's my before/after stats for http://www.battleforums.com/forums.

Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Google: 134,000 indexed pages.
Yahoo: 431,346 indexed pages.
MSN: 182 indexed pages.

Monday June 09, 2008
Google: 209,000 indexed pages.
Yahoo: 5,700 indexed pages.
MSN: 343 indexed pages.

Traffic/performance definitely did not go down during this time.

How did your traffic change during this period?

Traffic has doubled since then. However, the percentage of SE traffic has gone from ~33% to 16%.

So - your total hits has stayed about the same then.

Has the #s for Google, or Yahoo individual changed?

How is your long tail data?
Measuring Your Long Tail - vBulletin SEO Forums

What was the source of your new traffic?

Hello Joe,

Thank you for the quick response.

As you can see in my initial post, the amount of google indexed pages rose just slightly, while the number of yahoo indexed pages dropped dramatically. Although traffic has stayed somewhat the same, I was expecting a raise in traffic with the purchase and installation of vBSEO - but I guess it didn't have much of an effect even months later.

My website is definitely long tail dominated. Judging from my rough stats, I estimate that I am getting around 50 hits/keyword with around 2500 keywords in total driving traffic to my website.

The source of my new traffic is coming from affiliated websites, contest promotions, and other non-organic sources.

You are doing well with your promotions.

Try getting rid of your forum title, within the TITLE part of your other pages, particularly your sub-forum pages and your showthread pages.

Beyond that I would recommend that you go through this list to see if there is anything appropriate for your site:
Your Site Review - Stuff to Do First

Are the links in the footer a link exchange? There a few there that seem slightly off-topic, particularly the gambling link.

Just finished making some changes to my vBSEO configurations. Hopefully, this will improve my rankings .

I'm not 100% sure I understand what you mean about my titles. Is what I did correct?

Thanks again for your help.

Here you go. This is a new resource I added to help with this area:
[How To] Remove Forum Title from Thread Pages for Long Tail Optimization / Increased Thread Title Relevancy

Thank you very much Joe.

Just wondering, wouldn't this lower the click through rate in search engine listings for these pages, since the main topic of the forum isn't mentioned?

Good question.

Think of it this way: Click through rate assumes that they *see* the link. The goal of this optimization is to boost the # of pages that actually rank by helping page titles be more relevant to what the page content is really about, and not skewed by keywords contained in your site branding.

So, overall we expect more pages to be returned in the search results, and more traffic.

But back to your question. When they do actually see the link, will they be less compelled to click it, because it does not include your forum name?

Branding Does Matter
There is no *definite* answer to that question. Words have a lot of power. Therefore an extremely compelling brand may very well have an impact on a user's decision to click it, or to select another link instead. Keep this in mind when creating your content. Titles are important. I've been advocating moderators to actively alter titles from user content when they do not accurately represent the thread topics, etc.

If your brand is extremely well known, it could also stand out by having this information in the title, when displayed in the search results.

General Versus Specific Keyword Searching
With the long tail SEO effect, typically what happens is that you will be the bulk of your traffic from pretty specific keyword combinations.

In that sense, the search done by the users tends to be very well defined, and less general or abstract. A *specific* search can be considered to be a easy to convert. That is, once they find the information matching their query, they will likely choose it with less focus on the associated brand (or source of the info).

With a generic or abstract query, the results will be on a variety of topics associated with the specified term. The results that are selected will also be more generic. This is when a brand, or even the randomness of items returned to the generic query, start to play a greater factor in click through.

On a long tail system like vBSEO, the bulk of incoming traffic should be expected to be more highly defined keywords. Therefore, the brand will likely play a more diminutive role in click through rate.

Also keep in mind, that (in your case) your brand is in the domain name, and that still gets display right within the Google results.

Now that you've done this upgrade, I think you see your long tail grow.
Measuring Your Long Tail - vBulletin SEO Forums

Keep us posted of your results.

Thank you very much for your help Joe. Very much appreciated. I'll be sure to keep everyone updated .