FlyffWorld.com - Pretty Damn Large Forum, Testing VBSEO

[Tor]

About Me
I know crap about seo besides the basics. Read some reviews on VBSeo, and thought I test it out.

Why I Want To Test VBSEO
I want to see what SEO can further do for my forum. I want to see what type of effect it will have on revenue. I want to see how it effects my page rank from google.

Links
11/11/07
Google: 79,600
MSN: 480
Yahoo: 124,000 (inlinks: 890)

I'll keep everyone updated on a weekly basis.

[Joe Ward]

Welcome aboard. I just sent your activation email.

Looking forward to hearing about your success.

[ltjman22]

This should be a very good review, from a large forum!

[Garala]

Nice forum buddy.

[Tor]

So 4 months gone by...

Google: 157,000 from 79,600
Yahoo: 128,000 (390 Inlinks) from 124,000 (inlinks: 890)
Msn (live.com): 750 from 480

The only search that matters is google right now for my site. Back in November when I first installed VBseo, i was getting...

8,000-10,00 unique visitors per day (8500 average)

As of January My lowest day was 8,099 and my highest day was 13,208. For 20 days in January was I doing over 10k visitors to 12k uniques.

Now In Febuary, my lowest day is 9,539, and the highest is 12,081. Well my lowest was actually yesterday when the server crashed for about 6-8hours and I took down the site for about 4-5 hours. During the crash it registered, 5,514.

As of Right now (3:21 PM USA PST 02/12/08) I have 7,108 unique visitors.

According to Google Analystics, prior to using VBseo, I had about 30-35% search engine Traffic. The rest were direct links and referrals. Now it says that 51.79% are from search Engines. A 15-20% increase.

I'm not saying that every one of my visitors visit the forum and the installation of vbseo has accounted for growth. However, I do believe 100% vbseo has help my traffic increase.

Earnings have increased but due to other things that I have done. Ofcourse more traffic, means more money, but I don't think you can truly say that installing vbseo will help increase your earnings.

The mod_rewrite that I use is (don't remmeber the title, too lazy to login into admincp)

www.flyffworld.com/forums/t66941/
www.flyffworld.com/forums/f14/

I chose this format because I didn't like the long URL's, and I noticed that even though they are keyword rich, they weren't right for my forums. I did notice that google adsense ads, displayed more ads based on the title of the URL.

But after awhile, I started to notice all the "stop words" missing and soon the titles didn't make since. I switched to the current url format after testing about 5-10 days with the other format. Probably not a good idea, since you're suppose to "set and forget"

I used vb for over 3 years I think. Don't even remember anymore. VB url's by default are already being indexed by search engines pretty, I noticed. VB seo does help more though.

I used the 3.1 gold released. I also really haven't messed with the settings much, and left everything by default. I'm not sure if I tinker with the settings if that would do anymore good for my website. I do use the vb mod, that submits url's to yahoo and google (forget the name). I think that helps a lot as well.

Anyways, this is a good product for any VB owner to have. I would recommend it to my friends and any fellow webmaster who doesn't know how to deal with SEO and want to help increase their traffic and relevancy on the web!

[Brandon Sheley]

the site isn't loading for me :(

[Joe Ward]

According to Google Analystics, prior to using VBseo, I had about 30-35% search engine Traffic. The rest were direct links and referrals. Now it says that 51.79% are from search Engines. A 15-20% increase.

I'm not saying that every one of my visitors visit the forum and the installation of vbseo has accounted for growth. However, I do believe 100% vbseo has help my traffic increase.

Congratulations. It sounds like you are making excellent progress.

Earnings have increased but due to other things that I have done. Of course more traffic, means more money, but I don't think you can truly say that installing vbseo will help increase your earnings.

More traffic certainly leads to more revenue, and vBSEO delivers the traffic.

But you are correct. There are other ways to enhance your revenue even with the same level of traffic. Check out some of the discussions here on ad placement for example, on how some users have seen significant gains in revenue just by optimizing their ad placement.

Ultimate solution? More traffic from vBSEO + better ad placement = a dual source of increased revenue.

[Tor]

the site isn't loading for me :(

Yea, website just crashed, because of a traffic spike. Lol, my server load jump to 100, 99, 91 according to VB admin panel. It should be working now though.

But you are correct. There are other ways to enhance your revenue even with the same level of traffic. Check out some of the discussions here on ad placement for example, on how some users have seen significant gains in revenue just by optimizing their ad placement.

=D cool, i'll be sure to that.

[teenhut]

Isnt 100 load a lot

Once my server happened to went upto 30 and my VPS crashed. lol.

Great going. Very good forum.


But hey, isn't CRU's more beneficial? Like thread titles as thread urls?

[Tor]

Yea it's bad. It was running like that when I checked the admin cp. Then my forum just locked. This happens once in a while because of the type of forum I run where, once a week, the official website that I run a fansite for, goes down. When that happens, everyone rushes to me.

But hey, isn't CRU's more beneficial? Like thread titles as thread urls?

I don't know. Probably is because of the keyword rich URL. I didn't like it because of the effect it had on google adsense. Especially on new threads. I guess, base on what I was seeing was that the algorithm or whatever they use to calculate the type of ads to display, is weigh by the URL. Especially on a new thread. Base on what I was using when I use that URL format. Not sure about now.

[Joe Ward]

You found that a keyword rich URL was negatively impacting your AdSense relevancy or clickthrough?

[Tor]

Yup for my type of website.

[Joe Ward]

Can you give us more details? I'm interested in how that works in your case, as we certainly expect a CRUs and onpage SEO to lead to more relevant ads and improved ad clicks.