4 months and no improvement

With everything new I always give it time to prove itself but looks like VBSEO has had no effect what so ever.

The useless index info as its referrals that count

2006-11-16 Start date of vbseo
Google - Results 1 - 100 of about 24,300
MSN - Page 1 of 491 results
Yahoo - Pages (47,762)

010107
Google -- Results 1 - 10 of about 46,000
MSN -- Page 1 of 569 results
Yahoo -- Pages (2,647)

080207
Google Results 1 - 100 of about 45,800
MSN Page 1 of 888 results
Yahoo Pages (2,003)

080307
Google Results 1 - 100 of about 15,800 ( mostly library )
MSN Page 1 of 916 results
Yahoo Pages (2,023)

Ive has zero increase of referrals from google (I use Google Analytic) ever over the past 4 months or compared with this period last year.

Now this is no magic script but some improvement was expected although small. Some people will chip in and say give it more time but to me the effect would have shown by now if Vbseo had worked as the longer the time period then other changing factors can help a site ( google analog changes ect ) This site is a few years old and google bots love to come and play.

Oh well couple of dollars down the drain

Stick with it Ric. Although SEO often provides more short-term results, it is a long-term investment. Keep building content & try to establish more backlinks.

What do you make of the huge drop in yahoo included pages? 47,762 to 2,023 ???

A lot may be due to purging of duplicate content in the beginning, but it appears Yahoo is responding slower to re-indexing in this case.

Cheers

building content & try to establish more backlinks.

Content is good for a forum and backlinks are quiet strong as its a on going project.

18282 via google sitemap - External links tool
Inlinks (33,911) - yahoo Site explorer

We use vBSEO since August 2006 and don't see any change regarding SERPs.

The new URLs are nice, but have no effect.

May I suggest removing all those Archive Links at the bottom and disallowing the archive in robots.txt?

You are diluting your link weight that is passed to other pages with that many archive links. It's not "PR leak" like everyone else calls it it's common sense logic. Google calculates your link weight and then determines how much weight to give each page. Your goal is to get the most weight to your actual threads not your archive and by waisting over 100 links per page you are in effect wasting valuable weight that could be used to target your threads and give more weight to your actual forums.

That's how I see it as far as those links go.

You only want Google to index the quality content on your forum which is your main page, individual forums, and threads. Your archive is not quality content.

This is where you will win in the long term with Google. Since you are making your page easier to index and you have optimized it so that Google only touches the pages you actually want to index it will gradually build up and your rankings will slowly improve over time.

My recommendations (if you have done some of these cool.. this is more of a for everyone deal)
- Turn off archive completely and Disallow it via robots.txt
- Turn your single posts into anchors and disallow showpost.php via robots.txt (this tells google to drop showpost.php pages from it's index)
- Disallow printthread.php in Robots.txt

You can view my robots.txt here: http://www.mustangevolution.com/robots.txt and check out the Forum sections for what I have disallowed. You will also notice I have some threads disallowed and forums. These are forums and threads that are no longer visible. The threads also could be duplicate content from switching over some articles to wordpress.

If you stay on top of it you can make sure you pretty much eliminate duplicate content. Once you do that your job is building links.

Have you gone into your Google Sitemaps yet and examined your links? How many do you have to your home page? How many do you have to individual threads? Then think of any competition you have and if they are a lot older than you think of the time they have on you in building solid links up. You just got to keep at it.

Thanks for the in put as every thing counts

May I suggest removing all those Archive Links at the bottom and disallowing the archive in robots.txt?

The way its set up is purly as a sitemap and the only dup is the urls . Bit confused how this would trigger a penalty with google. If so why is it an option within VBSEO admin or in vBulletin itself ?

Thanks again great info

There would be no "Penalty" per say. However it's all about targeting the pages you want to rank and giving them all the help you can get.

Right now you have 118 links to a low quality page that won't rank anywhere in Google in your footer. This appears site wide meaning on your threads and forums these 118 links appear.

The reason that the option is there is because there is no one right way in SEO. There are differences of opinions and the great thing about VBSEO is that it gives you options to fit your style.

You also have to take into consideration that this feature is over a year old now. SEO changes everyday it seems. Google is constantly changing their algorithm.

This is a great article on Wasting Link Authority on Ineffective Internal Link Structure

If you are wasting link equity getting low value noisy pages indexed then your high value pages will not rank as well as they could because you wasted link equity getting low value pages indexed. In some cases getting many noisy navigational pages indexed could put your site on a reduced crawling status (shallow crawl or less frequent crawl) that may preclude some of your higher value long tail brand specific pages from getting indexed.

Thanks agian and have added some of the robot.txt as u are right on them and it was a silly over sight by me !

Still not sure about the archive as have looked at quiet a few big fast growing forums like shauns Webmaster Forum - Internet Marketing & Search Engine Forums and his setup of which is as it came out of the box , so it cannot hurt

But will stew on it and as there has been no advancement with VBSEO script what so ever then will have to think.Plus the archive is the only thing now index with google since I switched

Phew all this thinking is not good for me hehe

Originally Posted by BamaStangGuy

May I suggest removing all those Archive Links at the bottom ............

Bama are you talking about the linked numbers at the bottom of the forum? How does one disable those? and where? I never enabled them, that I know of, and can't seem to find them

Thank you

In vbseocp.php find: Footer Archive Links

and Select: Do not add Links to Archive Pages

Still not sure about the archive as have looked at quiet a few big fast growing forums like shauns Webmaster Forum - Internet Marketing & Search Engine Forums and his setup of which is as it came out of the box , so it cannot hurt

It may be sufficent when you have an authority site such as his with thousands and thousands of links to threads and hundreds of thousands of links to his home page. I have never been a fan of "just doing enough" because sooner or later you will find a competitor that goes beyond "just enough" and he will gain the edge on you. Again my belief and my philosophy on that. It sure can't hurt me to disallow a low quality page like the archive. If Google does it's job it'll take notice that my site is getting all its linke to one url and the correct page.

Take for instance Shoemoney. He was doing "ok" and then he did some basic SEO to his wordpress blog and his Google referrals went up 1400%

If you don't have an authority site and your userbase is not as tech savy then you want to make sure that there is only one way that they can link back to your site so that you have the advantage over your competition. Right now my biggest competitor has horrid SEO but they are the largers, they have age on their side and have years worth of back links. So I have to do what I can to catch up.

Originally Posted by BamaStangGuy

In vbseocp.php find: Footer Archive Links

and Select: Do not add Links to Archive Pages

thank you!

I was about to make this change, but a quick semi-related question. The vbseo config file needs changing to chmod 666 for all changes right? Should I be changing to 666 for the change, then back to 644 after the change?