My bad experience with VBSEO

I bought VBSEO like 3 months ago, and since them our trafic from google is keep going down. Right now, there are only 216.000 results from google (site:computergames.ro - Cãutare Google=), down from 1.100.000 before installing VBSEO. From 145k users/week we are now down to 90k users/week . We are also using VBSEO Sitemap, the bots are crawling (average of 40k crawls/ day), google map is downloaded. What is wrong?
Beside that, the board is always much slower with VBSeo active then without it. We have almost 3milion posts and 70000 members. With VBSeo installed the load is over 4, without it is 0.5.

AfAIK, this is normal. Because you have now created new url's that need to be crawled and reindexed (hence the bots). The number of old indexed url's will go down, this has to do with duplicate content that is being redirected to the correct and original page.

Eventually you will notice that your SERP rakings will improve, because the new url's can receive more pr, also when the new url's are indexed, the traffic will recover and new users will find their way to your board. Give it some time, Google works slowly.

About the load you might want to contact the team here, because there are things that can be done to lower it.

And how long will this take? Years?

Reindexing such a huge number of url's can take up to 6 months for Google (from my experience) but you should be ok in less then a year. However, your traffic will go up mutch faster than that.

Lets hope so
And the load problem? Is caused by the huge amount of data that VBSeo must handle?

I believe there is some extra load in the first months using it, but I added in my first reply there are other solutions to the load problem. A vbseo support member should be able to help you

Ive contacted them , did what they told me i should do, only a minor improvement I even consider move the forum on a dual xeon64 with 6 gb memory.

Along with the VBSEO introduction, we've converted the entire DB in order to use utf8 charset, seems there is a strange problem with charset/collation problem in VB. Could this affect how Google is now indexing us?

You should manually enable this option in config_vbseo.php file in this case:

PHP Code:

    define('VBSEO_UTF8_SUPPORT',        1); 


Hello Stroie,

You have an AMAZING site. Loads of content, great graphics, and VERY active forums, congrats.

I did a quick assesment of your forums and noticed a couple of details you might want to look into:

Your forum's homepage PR is 0. Deeper crawlings require higher PR's. Of course, it's expected as it does seem that you have recently moved your forums from http://computergames.ro/forums/ to http://forums.computergames.ro. Please be aware that such change may, and most likely play a role in your reduced SEM performance.

Also, it seems you have set up 302 redirects instead of 301 redirects both for your homepage and deeper forum content which can be counterproductive. Search Engines need to know content has been permanently moved via 301 redirects. Notice how Google lists results for your previous forum location with no supplemental entries.

Looking at your redirect behaviour, it seems that you have defined some .htaccess rules for redirection. You should disable those and allow vBSEO to automatically redirect them (assuming that Computer Games Forum is the same folder as Computer Games Forum).

Example:

http://www.computergames.ro/forum/showthread.php?t=201793

will get redirected to:

http://forum.computergames.ro/44-gsm/201793-vand-sony-ericsson-z800i-stare-fb-impecabila-650ron-usor-negociabil.html

As for the homepage redirect (this is critical), use:

Code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^forum\.computergames\.ro
RewriteRule ^$ http://forum.computergames.ro/ [L,R=301]

With VBSeo installed the load is over 4, without it is 0.5.

It's imperative that your pages load fast and snappy, and Crawlability takes that very seriously. In fact, vBSEO 3.0.0 is the lightest, best performing vBSEO ever, caching most resource intensive data and minimizing dB queries often to zero (yes, no dB queries) by hooking code in really creative ways.

Oleg is still awaiting your response to ticket 1358 to further troubleshoot your load issue. Often it's due to non-standard server setups, incompatibility issues, etc.

Your forums have great potential, I'm looking forward to see you get FANTABULOUS results from vBSEO once these issues have been corrected. Keep us updated!

Thanks for your reply!
We are one of the oldest site in Romania and the first one with a board on int (since 1998) thats why we have so much content.
We will apply the changes that you mentioned, thanks for your support.

Right now we have :

computergames.ro = 216.000 results
Computer Games Forum = 207.000 results

Don't forget, vbSEO also removes tons of duplicate content that is created by vBulletin.. you can access a single thread so many ways (?p=, ?t=, /archive/, etc, etc..), which isn't good for the quality of the results you have on search engines.

So, while you might wind up with fewer results in google, once they are done reindexing your page, the quality of the results that are listed will be much higher..

This soudns awful

Originally Posted by dutchbb

Reindexing such a huge number of url's can take up to 6 months for Google (from my experience) but you should be ok in less then a year. However, your traffic will go up mutch faster than that.

Originally Posted by GGG

This soudns awful

If by awful you mean Google taking up to 6 months or longer to reindex, not transfering PR through 301 redirects and providing serps that fluctuate more than North Korea's willingness to give up Nuclear Weapons, then yea.. I agree it's awful too

301 redirects? From his startpage you mean?

I have maaaany old links I cannot change to vb posts.