My Experience - PanthersHuddle.com

I run the largest Carolina Panthers fan site and forum http://www.panthershuddle.com

Purchased VBSEO yesterday and quickly received the package from the admins. Nice work guys.

I downloaded the test.php and ran it, unfortunately neither install option tested ok. So I decided what the heck, I will install it anyways and see what happens.

Well, after the install my server load went from 1 to 20! Needless to say the site was crawling, no , more like laying down. So I quickly disabled the .htaccess file. This brought the server load back to normal within a minute.

After PMing vbseo staff for advice, I installed the zend optimizer that was required for the zend install of vbseo. Having never installed such a package on a linux box, I was hesitant. So I launched my putty session and installed it. Turns out is was extremely easy to do and installed in seconds.

I then installed the zend version of VBSEO and it installed fine. The server load has increased, but only to 2.x which is manageable for now, but I would liek help with optimizing this.

VB 3.14
Celery Server
Linux
Zend VBSEO

Anyways, so far this morning according to the sitemap stats google has crawled over 200 pages in my forum, and its only been an hour. So far I am well pleased.

Current google pages indexed : 3,180

Hello Jeremy and welcome to vBSEO

I then installed the zend version of VBSEO and it installed fine. The server load has increased, but only to 2.x which is manageable for now, but I would liek help with optimizing this.

vBulletin 3.14
Celery Server
Linux
Zend VBSEO

There are various options for reducing server load... In order of significance:

1. Upgrading to vB 3.5.x - vBSEO works beautifully with the newer vB series as hooks are used to cache certain data and make it available for the rewrites.
2. Changing your rewrite rules to your httpd.conf file. This requires slightly different rewrite rules. For better results, your .htaccess file should be removed altogether (httpd.conf rules sent via PM).
3. Minor tweaks to your my.cnf file (please post or submit a ticket with your current settings so that we can advice on those)

Once again, welcome aboard and I look forward to see your progress report

Its been a week and a half.

Google indexed: 3810
VBSEO pages: 40

Odd note... It seems that the majority of the VBSEO pages by far are those from the VBGallery, which have no rewrites at all, but the VBSEO footer is present so it shows up.

Yahoo indexed : 14,400
VBSEO Pages: 99

Yahoo seems to love the profiles pages, that is the majority of what it has indexed from VBSEO. Maybe because the profile pages are cleaner?

Overnight Yahoo indexed 1,650 of my VBSEO pages. It indexed mostly profile pages but also indexed a few hundred topics as well.

Odd.

Update... It has been about 3 weeks since the install.

Google pages indexed - 3,940
Google vbseo pages indexed - 168

Yahoo Pages indexed 17,800
Yahoo vbseo pages indexed - 1,940

All in all I am pleased so far with the progress. I just finished adding some tweaks to my forums and hope the results will improve over the next several weeks.

Google update this morning, the total amount of pages indexed dropped big time. However, the number of VBSEO pages increased.

Google pages indexed - 576 down from 3940
VBSEO Pages - 427 up from 168

I am not worried about all the lost URL's because they were all junk and never got me any site traffic. I have already seen new search queries on my stats from google and am very happy with placement of the results on the SERPS, usually on the first page and sometimes the first or second result.

As a note, my idea of including an RSS feed of latest topics on the front page seems to have paid off as all of the new forum indexed pages are recent and would have been part of the rss feed.

Yes - in addition to helping maximize your forum page indexing - we optimize on a page-by-page basis. So the issue of quality vs. quantity certainly is priority number 1.

Most of the indexed pages that are beginning to get removed at the time of indexing are redundant URLs to the same content (i.e. duplicate content). This is a necessary and positive step as vBSEO moves you toward the ultimate goal of achieving 1-URL-per-resource.

OK, almost 1 month since I first installed VBSEO.

VBSEO Indexed Pages - 805

Before I installed VBSEO I would get maybe 40 visitors from google average. This was all mainly do to 20 search terms or so.

Yesterday I had 240 referrals from Google using 115 search terms. All from only 800 indexed pages. I can't wait to see what happens once I have tens of thousands of pages indexed.

Well - a 600% increase in referrals certainly sounds good. Keep us posted as your indexed page count and referrals grow.

UPDATE


Yahoo is killing google currently. More pages indexed and as of the last few days more referrals.

GOOGLE VBSEO pages indexed - 452 (number has dropped quite a bit)
Yahoo VBSEO pages indexed - 5,150

Attached is a graph of my Yahoo referral history over the past few weeks. it reads from right to left, left being yesterday. I think I can see a definite trend there....

Quick Update...

Google - 15,700
Yahoo - 13,400

One interesting note is that when I lookup siteanthershuddle.com on google I get a return of 81,600. A ton of these are individual posts that have "view single post" in the title and appear to be VBSEO optimized, but do not have a header or a footer file that they use. As my tracking code is in the header, I have added $header to the single post template so that these will be tracked now for google referrals.

sounds like the showpost.php pages.

FYI - Analytics tracking has been added for showpost.php in the next vBSEO version

hmm... when browsing from the main page to the forums I got hit by some kind of ad (pop-under or iframe embedded??) that crashed my computer..... I wonder what effect could those have in SEO??