Is vbSEO working for me???

I moved my 6 year old site from a .com.au domain to .net (I had .net for many years with just a single hello page) and parked the .com.au on top of .net

On the move I changed from vb 3.x to vb v4.x and vbSEO v3.5.1

It was done at the start of July and has now been going for 3.5 months, here is a screen shot of Google Analytics:


The spike was a result of a mass mail out to every forum member but as you can see NOTHING is happening, it has not moved, the traffic is static, no growth at all from day 1

I was willing to pay for someone at vbSEO to do a complete check of my site but unfortunately told that can't be done:
Looking for complete site SEO optimisation

Any thoughts???

Hello,

Sorry for missing this yesterday.

Do you have any stats from before July? It's hard to say anything has happened/changed/improved without a baseline to compare against. While it is 'flat' the past 3 months, there's no way to to tell if that flat line is a 500% improvement or not.

Parked/301'ed and all the rest, it still requires a re-index from .com.au to .net. Effectively, you started over from day 1 with your site. While the domain may be 6 years old, it had 0 content on it as well.

Under 50% search engine referrals is generally low for a large forum, so there is definitely room for improvement in the search engine realm.

Your menu bar isn't helping your forum get any page weight as its a 301.
Brian's Tip of the Week #1 - Avoiding Unnecessary 301's

You have several markup errors that you should address
[Invalid] Markup Validation of http://www.recreationalflying.net/forum/ - W3C Markup Validator

You have javascript errors

Code:

Error: document.getElementById("livezilla_tracking") is null
Source File: http://www.recreationalflying.net/forum/
Line: 2111

You're linking to a 404 which caused slow loads while it tries to find the resource
http://www.recreationalflying.net/fl...s/flashcoms.js

I'm not sure where you're hosted, but even from a Sidney ping, your site is pretty slow loading and not well-optimized at the server-level
WebPagetest - <b>Sydney : www.re...lflying.net/forum/

We have a CDN solution in the works... stay tuned for a special partner offer in a short while.


Check your license key in vbseocp.php. Our system had you listed as a root install, not /forum. Make sure a good key is saved in your CP to reflect the correct install path.

Thanks Brian...

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

Hello,

Sorry for missing this yesterday.

Do you have any stats from before July? It's hard to say anything has happened/changed/improved without a baseline to compare against. While it is 'flat' the past 3 months, there's no way to to tell if that flat line is a 500% improvement or not.

- The previous 6 months were also flat causing me to think that the site was at its max point so I created a thread about it at vb vBulletin Community Forum

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

Parked/301'ed and all the rest, it still requires a re-index from .com.au to .net. Effectively, you started over from day 1 with your site. While the domain may be 6 years old, it had 0 content on it as well.

- Yes but nearly 4 months later and not even a hint of a slight increase. As the site gets indexed more and more there would be a curved increase and Google etc bots are on the site 24/7

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

Under 50% search engine referrals is generally low for a large forum, so there is definitely room for improvement in the search engine realm.

Your menu bar isn't helping your forum get any page weight as its a 301.
Brian's Tip of the Week #1 - Avoiding Unnecessary 301's

There were a couple of /folder in there so I have changed them to /folder/ now, I assume .../folder/ is ok instead of the entire address - is that correct?

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

You have several markup errors that you should address
[Invalid] Markup Validation of http://www.recreationalflying.net/forum/ - W3C Markup Validator

You have javascript errors

Code:

Error: document.getElementById("livezilla_tracking") is null
Source File: http://www.recreationalflying.net/forum/
Line: 2111

You're linking to a 404 which caused slow loads while it tries to find the resource
http://www.recreationalflying.net/fl...s/flashcoms.js

- Thanks, I am going through each one of them now

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

I'm not sure where you're hosted, but even from a Sidney ping, your site is pretty slow loading and not well-optimized at the server-level
WebPagetest - <b>Sydney : www.re...lflying.net/forum/

- I use a true Virtual Dedicated Server hosted in Melbourne with the settings also optimised by the vb server optimisation service from some members on the vb site - I will again look further into this

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

We have a CDN solution in the works... stay tuned for a special partner offer in a short while.

- Great, hope it is cost effective

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

Check your license key in vbseocp.php. Our system had you listed as a root install, not /forum. Make sure a good key is saved in your CP to reflect the correct install path.

I advised the license change including stating that the site had the forums in /forum/ by support ticket 8117-WEYP-8144 on the 30th June which was responded with that the license was then updated so the person who updated my license didn't do it properly so has this effected my site seo?

It shouldn't have caused an issue, but just double check the cp to make sure its not prompting you to save a new/different key than the one that is currently in there.