My experience with vbseo

The support from the vbseo team has always been terrific. No problems with that. My issue is with vbseo, the product. Since installing, I haven't noticed much of a change in google spiders on my site. I've had this up and running for over 6 months now.

It's a pricey piece of software that I'm afraid isn't working for me. I don't mind paying for the product, especially since the support has been so great, but this product isn't working for me. What gives?

What is your URL?

North Eastern Fly Fishing

One thing I notice is that you're running an older version of vBSEO Sitemap that isn't fully compatible with vBSEO 3.0.0. Get vBSEO Sitemap 1.7 from the downloads area here.

Also, set up and use Google Analytics to track your search engine referrals. That's how you can really measure how well your site is indexed.

I just installed 1.7. No problems. My sitemaps are stored here:

http://www.njflyfishing.com/vBulleti...o_sitemap/data

Google says to make them available in the lowest directory I have access too which is, North Eastern Fly Fishing

How do I get google to pick up the sitemap files in this location so I don't have to manually copy the files there?

Thanks.

vBSEO's .htaccess already has a rule in it to make the sitemap appear to be located in your forums directory, so submit the sitemaps as if they exist there.

Here are details on how to add sitemap in domain root if your forum is located in a subfolder: Sitemap in www root

Here is an update with vbseo.

I've taken your suggestions and have noticed a substantial increase in google links. I'm now in the 41000 area rather than 7 (Seven) not 7000. Not too shabby but also not too good for some reason!?!?!?

A few questions I have...

1. I very rarely see Google spiders on my site but I see Yahoo spiders all the time. Is this because Google no longer spiders my site and just uses the sitemaps that are being created?

2. As mentioned above, I have quite a few links in google for my site. If I do a relevent search though, I don't show up for a few pages. For an example... If I search google for, Delaware River Fly Fishing, my site shows up on page 4! (Terrible)
a. If it do a google search on my site for Delaware River Fly fishing, it shows 1700 links on my site to key words containing Delaware River Fly Fishing.

a. The first site that shows up in a google search is www.mayfly.com. If I site search google (site:Delaware River Club delware river fly fishing), it only has 42 links to that site.
b. The second site that comes up for a delaware River Fly Fishing search is, Troutsource.com Fly-Fishing Rivers. The google links for that are only 59.

I would have thought that since my site has 1700 relevant links, it would be on the top of the chart. I assume that I'm still doing something wrong here.

Thanks for the help!

I think you are making too many assumptions about google and how it ranks. Just getting your pages indexed is not by itself going to improve your organic rankings.

You still need to work at the rest of your SEO, like modifying your vBulletin templates to properly use <H1> and <h2> tags, getting inbound links and lots of them, as well as making sure those inbound links have a high pr. I think two or 3 inbound links from a PR6 or higher will do a lot more benefit than 1000 from pr1 or 2. Of course, you want those as well.

SEO is a combination of many different things, so I think the best place to start is with your content. Then confirm you have high quality inbound links with decent pr, then look at your site design and use of H1 and H2 tags.

Finally, you need to make sure that your site is actually relevant to the keywords you are trying to get ranked for. Your assumption that since you have more pages indexed, you should be ranked higher is a faulty one. Google does not rank you based on quantity, but rather quality and for some reason, Google has determined your site is not as relevant for the keywords in question.

Thanks for the reply! So where/how do I fix the H1/H2 tags and optimize my keywords?

Search this forum... there is a post on how to modify your templates...

I did a search for templates and templates h1 h2 and a few other things but couldn't find much info.

If I go to the Google 'Page Analysis' and look at, 'In your sites content', there are a bunch of words that don't really have anything to do with the site content... For example, rather than having "Fly Fishing" "Catskills" etc... I have "Post, new, thanked, thread" and some usernames, and other things that are irrelevant.

How can I get these to be more focused on the site? Also, I'd love to learn more about optimizing templates. Thanks

Have a look at this forum:

Tweak vBulletin for Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) - vBulletin Setup

Loads of vbulletin optimization (including adding h1 tags) threads in there.