Taking full advantage of vBSEO

I have two vBSEO'd forums www.windychat.com and www.mapforums.com and am about to invest in a third one.

First, though - just glancing at my existing two sites, do you see anything obvious I'm not taking advantage of in vBSEO that I should be doing?

I want to make sure I'm using vBSEO properly before I set up my third one..

Thanks,
Eric

Re: windycity.com

I think you have too many links in the footer. I would disable the footer archive links feature.

I prefer replacing the showpost link altogether, by using the vBSEO feature to replace showpost links with permalinks.

Do people search more often for "Windy City" or for "Chicago"? I would like to see the keyword chicago in more than one of your sub-forum names, and used a little more prominently in the site.

You seem to have 5 text ads at the bottom. What is the deal with those? The text in these are going to throw off your keyword relevancy on every single page of your forum. I would like to see these removed entirely. However, if you keep them, it would be preferable that you either (a) Get rid of the text other than the link anchor text, or (b) convert them all into an image based sitemap (that is, it can look like text, but should be in an image so the text has no effect on the keyword density for your pages).

Check out our Relevant Replacements feature.

You should use the welcome headers modification and convert it to an image.

Try to improve your forum names and descriptions:

• Without Chicago in many of the forum names, the names are very generic and will not likely generate you much Chicago specific traffic.
• What are some hot discussion topics for Chicago? Obama? Lake Michigan pollution? Fox at Chicago airports?
• What are some specific names for events in Chicago?
• Might as well move the classified to the bottom of the forum list unless it has something specific to Chicago detailed in there.
• Is "New Eastside" the only neighborhood?
• What are the names of some of the hottest restaurants? None are listed in your forum descriptions.

Re: mapforums.com

The sites are setup similarly, so the above comments would apply.

I can say that the forum names and descriptions for this forum seem to be a little better targeted.

Thanks, I have this bookmarked! I'll go ahead and set up the new forum and then swing back to this. I'll definitely do relevant replacements on all three boards.

By the way, do you think it's worthwhile to use the vBSEO skin?
vBSEO.com 1.0 Style Released for vBSEO-enabled forums

Any plans to develop other skins?

Eric

Personally - I really like the vBSEO skin. It's organized, graphic lite, and user friendly. Here is an example of a customer who I believe has done the best job using it, and modifying it for their own purposes:
The Recognized Expert Marketing Show

We have no plans to develop any other skins. The vBSEO skin will be developed for our own use, and provided to customers as a courtesy since we received many requests to use it.

Interesting read

Joe Ward, could you please check my forums and let me know of anyways they could be improved. ive done the best I can but I may be missing something http://www.djpassion.co.uk/forums/

Just that the pagerank for my forums haven’t changed. It’s been 3 since I set them up without vBSEO. My homepage, directory pageranks went higher but my forums still the same. I know its not all bout pagrank but still just curious why it hasn’t changed. vbseo’s been installed on my forum for well over a year now.
The forums seem to rank a bit well serps wise though
Please check the forums and let me in on any tips etc if you have any

I might well purchase another copy of vbseo for another forum of mine. Not sure yet.

cheers chris

Oh now, now I have opened the floodgates, Joe will be reviewing people's sites full-time :-)

I can tell you, vBSEO doesn't increase the overall amount of PR to play with, but does help the flow within the site.. and you can turn on the nofollow to keep the flow within your site.

You should try to get more higher PR (PR5 and PR6) inbound links to increase your pagerank, it should not be so hard.

Eric

Hi Chris. Please post your request in our Critique forum:
vBulletin SEO Discussion - Critique Please at vBSEO.com

Originally Posted by Chris Powell

Interesting read

Joe Ward, could you please check my forums and let me know of anyways they could be improved. ive done the best I can but I may be missing something DJ Community - Forums

Just that the pagerank for my forums haven’t changed. It’s been 3 since I set them up without vBSEO. My homepage, directory pageranks went higher but my forums still the same. I know its not all bout pagrank but still just curious why it hasn’t changed. vbseo’s been installed on my forum for well over a year now.
The forums seem to rank a bit well serps wise though
Please check the forums and let me in on any tips etc if you have any

I might well purchase another copy of vbseo for another forum of mine. Not sure yet.

cheers chris

I can tell you, vBSEO doesn't increase the overall amount of PR to play with, but does help the flow within the site.. and you can turn on the nofollow to keep the flow within your site.

Actually - we do. Here is why:

• When we remove duplicate content, or duplicate paths to the same content, we achieve link consistency and consensus. Link consistency ensures that anyone who links to you, can do so using only 1 URL. The result, is that all the PageRank value that would previously have been separated, is forced to merge directly onto 1 page.
  • So, we are actually re-harvesting, all that old link value (or PageRank) that is lost in a setup that does not have link consistency and consensus. ONLY vBSEO-enabled forums achieve this much needed state.
• Our LinkBack system helps to encourage automated linking. A user posts a link to a blog, a pingback is sent, the blog ends up posting a link to your site (in some cases). When this occurs you have established new link value, all automatically.

Now most will tell you that PageRank has little meaning anymore, and certainly the value of the visible Toolbar PageRank is quite misleading.

It's quite impossible for such a simple 0-10 scale to accurately reflect everything that occurs in the search engine crawling/indexing/ranking algorithms. And, at this time, it is no longer enjoys a strong correlation with actual ranking for individual pages.

But we do know that relevant inbound (and even outbound) links are valuable for site SEO.

And, establishing link consistency and consensus, getting new links with our LinkBack system, and (as you noted) improving the "flow" throughout the forum, are all things that vBSEO offers to improve "link value", which also impacts PageRank, for your site.

Hey, don’t mean to highjack your thread Eric but I was interested in it, so thought rather than setup another one it would be easier just to follow up you know

Thanks for your tips though, Eric. I actually turned the no follow option on a few weeks back as it goes, as I thought my PR was leaking to the other domains in posts. I did exclude my partner sites though. Hopefully this will help. Another thing ive noticed is that even with nofollow turned on members could still get linkbacks by using their domain name in the title of a thread example
http://www.djpassion.co.uk/forums/internet-radio-broadcasts/4001-house-party-show-www-ssradiouk-com.html
Search for www.ssradiouk.com and you get http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=www.ssradiouk.com&btnG=Search see my thread right underneath ssradiouk I checked and see ssradiouk has the same pr for homepage as mine and ssradiouk forums have same pagerank as mine too

The person even used the name of his site in his username
Mad isn’t it how people go about link building etc lol

It wouldn’t surprise me if the domain name in thread title actually counts…well going by what Google did with it anyway. Does it count as a link back that do you know?

I wonder if theirs a vbulletin hack to stop full domain names being used in thread titles eg. Something that stops www. being used
When you say I should try to get higher PR sites linking in. do they have to link to the forums? Just that I think if I concentrate on all the inbound links that goto my domain name (homepage) it will goto the forums anyway as the forums link is in the navigation menu

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

Hi Chris. Please post your request in our Critique forum:
vBulletin SEO Discussion - Critique Please at vBSEO.com

Hey i will check it out thanks.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

But we do know that relevant inbound (and even outbound) links are valuable for site SEO.

This is the reason I put in for the branding free option for both vBulletin and vBSEO

Because there is no solid accurate rule(s) to follow when it comes to SEO I’ve just gone by a way that I think makes sense inbound/outbound SEO wise and that is my website doesn’t link to external domains other than the ones I choose to link to. Meaning my members cannot create profiles on my site like they used to be able to and put a of load html and loads of links linking to other sites anymore. They have to just use the forums profiles now. I have a new CMS system and that now whenever someone goes to one of the old URLs they are redirected back to the homepage. Since doing this, my homepage went from pr 3 to pr4. This could because of more backlinks from directorys being picked up though. Thats the thing its hard to tell. My directory is 100% reciprocal links so far. None are paid, and that the only links going out are sites that are linking back to my main domain name. My sites partners page same as above, some are reciprocal and others are some of my other sites where they linkback to my djpassion domain.

So I control my outbound links for the site, well apart from the forums. Even though I have nofollow on, members can still put their domain name in thread titles/unsername which as I previously mentioned think counts as a do follow link and counts as an outbound link. Sharing your own PR etc. If this is the case though I don’t think it’s such a big problem though as the links are relevant outbound links which as you say is good. Ok as long as Im not linking to spam sites etc. still its not nice when others sites leach of your own hard work :(

Of course, im sure the only place on my site where my page rank could leak lower though is from having a permanent link to vBSEO in my footer of the forums and vBuletin copyright text that wasnt relevant to the my forums niche. my forums arent about seo so dont linking to seo sites from the forums will do me any favours. the thing is having the free branding option for vbulletin/vbseo is better anyway. saves my members/visitors seeing it which is nothing to do with my forums site. so either way i havent wasted money. Also the no follow option. I turned this on a couple of weeks ago and only allow my partner sites the do follow attrubute. How I’ve gone about it is from what I’ve learnt over the past few years about SEO and hopefully should pay off. Let me know if you think I’ve gone about something wrong though Joe/anyone. I’m no SEO expert. Though hope im on the right tracks though

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

And, establishing link consistency and consensus, getting new links with our LinkBack system, and (as you noted) improving the "flow" throughout the forum, are all things that vBSEO offers to improve "link value", which also impacts PageRank, for your site.

ive left this disabled as many say its just too time-conusimg and as i dont fully undrstand what it doesnt dont want to risk using it.

The vBSEO copyright link has rel=nofollow applied.

Note: You can edit the copyright version you use via the config_vbseo.php file. Inside you can choose versions that do not have a link.

I know that. It's all about content too though isn’t it? An SEO company can link to any website! A DJ Community could but isn’t relevant if you not what I mean. I even think just having text in the footer can do a little harm. Surely, Search Engines can figure out that you have SEO content text in the footer. I’m not sure how they work things but I don’t think helps your traffic rankings. See if you had djpassion.co.uk just as text in the footer of this vBSEO sites I bet it would push my site rankings up. Go on try it heh

Edit: I bet vBulletin get loads of traffic just from having their text copyright in their customers sites search engines wise. i wonder what their google analytics reports shows, refferes by keywords etc. would love to see it

I think vBulletin does extremely well with viral marketing by having "Powered by vBulletin" as default in the forum title. There are many major forums online that have not removed this. The official Tivo forums are one example if I recall correctly.

Search engines are aware that web page footers contain copyright and related text. This has been around as long as the WWW has been. The links would be more significant than the text itself.

As far as keywords related to SEO, that's not going to make an impact. Remember SEO is not a bad thing. Search engines post webmaster guidelines with the goal of helping you "search engine optimize" your site.

Now - if you have the words "cracked by", "nulled", or "warez" down there is your footer that might be a different story. There certainly are blacklisted keyword variations out there. I'm sure you can imagine the kinds of terms that Google would never want to actively send traffic too.