vBSEO Forum Software

[briansol]

i doubt it. at best it will be competition for zoints or tfseo

[Joe Ward]

Vbulletin is coming up with SEO optmized URIs + CMS in there future releases this year.. this should setup a major competition for VBseo

This will not be a competitive offering to vBSEO, although I'm sure that it may cause some confusion at first. Actually, the structure of what they are doing is more similar to what you would expect to see in Wordpress. This is going to create a tremendous awareness of the value of a SEF structure, but the solution will continue to be vBSEO's link consensus structure, for maximum long tail SEO impact. However, just having the human readable structure available for their URLs will be a great boost to general usability.

They do have the capabilities in the future to do a bit more with general SEO. I think everyone would still love to see that perfected tableless style. To date, only vBSEO Team member, Mert, has been able to produce anything even close in his beta.

At this time I think it's pretty clear that they are going to be focusing on their CMS, the huge 4 series rewrite/refactoring (which will span out in multiple releases over a couple of years), and (in the very short term) correcting the privacy/trust issues that have popped up due to the method of integrating the new 3.8 AdSense feature.

Just as a full rewrite would create huge risks, imagine a team that decided to (1) refactor their code using a new programming methodology, (2) build an advanced CMS, (3) continue to develop and enhance a blog & Project Tools offering, (4) continue to bug fix and add new features requested by the userbase, AND (5) implement something of the magnitude of vBSEO in terms of SEO!

Item 1 in itself is a huge undertaking, which is really the question of the day. Item 2 requires all of their creative/design focus. Yet items 1-4 are certainly enough of a task list to fully consume any team!

Item 5 is what we focus on everyday, and certainly what we do best!

With vBulletin, I would love to see a full rewrite too, particularly if that is what is required to advance vBulletin farther into the future in a more efficient method with better capabilities and continually improved performance. However, I am OK with their current approach (and even a fan of it) because I think it helps to mitigate some of the risks that a huge rewrite would cause. If they were to actually complete the full rewrite without major issue, on time, and produce a high quality result, they would be doing something absolutely amazing in the software world, because many original projects do not go that smoothly... let alone rewrites!

I would not bet against the Jelsoft/IB team too quickly. They are an extremely intelligent and talented group, and I think that in 6 months time we may all be beaming about how right they were to take this refactoring approach with the 4 series.

Keep in mind the remarks that the vBSEO Team should create a forum software. Imagine that we or any other development group out there was listening to those calls (i.e. an opportunity) and the vB decided to do a full rewrite taking 2 years to complete, with no intermittent releases. That would be all the window of opportunity anyone would need to beat them to market with a new forum software, or for IPB to make continual progress at eroding vBulletin's user base, etc. The vBulletin 4 series, gradual refactoring process, helps alleviate this risk, and close up the opportunity for other teams hoping to snipe at vBulletin's user base.