Not sure this software helps at all

We've been using vbseo probably for over a year now, and I honestly don't think it helps at all with search engine rankings. I see loads of forums w/o vbseo that have more pages indexed and higher pr ranks than ours.

pages indexed and pagerank have nothing to do with gauging how well VBSEO works

Have you posted your site for a critique?

How have your actual search engine hits changed since you installed vBSEO? Your forum seems very active.

There are a few more things you might do to take advantage of vBSEO. I recommend that you try our Relevant Replacements feature. I also recommend that you consider our option to "Replace Showpost links with Permlink" (for the thread pages). Option is found with the vBSEO Control Panel (vbseocp.php).

Note: You should consider adding H1 tags to your pages to enhance the value of the titles. We'll be provide an article soon that will help explain how to do that, step by step.

I'm not a fan of your welcome message on your site or forum homepage. You could consider converting these to an image, to hide the non-relevant text.

For your site homepage, you might even want to rewrite that text to include some relevant keywords, rather than allow more generic text to be the first thing encountered on your site.

You are also using yöur "site title" as a part of the TITLE for every page on your site. For long tail optimization, I recommend removing this from the TITLE part of the page, particularly for thread pages which produce the largest volume of long tail traffic.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

I also recommend that you consider our option to "Replace Showpost links with Permlink" (for the thread pages).

Thank you. I did not find this option anywhere.

I'm apologize, in vbseocp.php, the feature is actually listed as:

Replace post number link with Permalink
Will replace individual showpost links with the "Permalink" link. Note: Posts will no longer be accessible individually.

Search for "Replace post number" with your browser to jump to it quickly.

If you enable this, the links to your *individual" post pages will be disabled. Instead, this link will be a permalink.

If you are not familiar with permalinks, this basically means that the link will be directly to the *post*, but on the same thread page. This is better for link consensus.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

This is better for link consensus.

Why isn't this the default, then?

This is not done by default because it represents a major change to vBulletin's user functionality.

It effectively removes all "individual post" pages from your forum.

While I recommend this as my preference for SEO, we cannot set it as a default which would cause this major changes in every forum that installed vBSEO.

We have to allow users the chance to learn about the future, and enable it if they choose to do so.