New Case Study - TimeshareGateway

I have a timeshare forum that was added to my site about 5 months ago. Curiously I started the forum at another domain and then decided to merge the two sites. That in itself posed some challenges for the optimization already underway with the two seperate domains. Now that they've been merged for over 5 months. I see very few lingering URLs anywhere pointing to the old domain. They're still out there though, and I still have the site up with a permanent redirect setup on some of the main pages. Unfortunately, the URLs that are out there point to odd ball pages like search and showcat?do= in my ReviewPost section.
The reason I hope this case study will be of interest is that I have not yet installed vBSEO, but plan to within the next couple of days. I want to be sure I am ready for the "commitment" since it would appear that some effort is needed to fully understand the impact that vBSEO will have on a site. It would seem that a baseline is needed to be able to measure anything. I hope that I can get a couple of questions answered before starting.

1. What will be the downside to having Photopost Classifieds and ReviewPost installed on this vBulletin forum? ReviewPost is in full use and I hope (with a small enhancement to the auctions piece to get classifieds ala auctions running soon).

2. I am fully aware of the lack of consisstency between URLs pointing to the same pages in ReviewPost. A bit disconcerting, and not sure what the implications are with vBSEO.

3. There are links to other parts of this website that are not under the vBulletin framework, mainly a seperate, custom classifieds section. I would be curious is there something in the configuration that dictates which folders to include in the implementation? I don't want to upset the robots for what I've already done on that side of the site.

4. I have already submitted a Google Sitemap for the pertinent pages in the ReviewPost section of the site. What do I do with this, and when? I don't want to confuse Google! Should I delete this before I start the vBSEO project?

5. I would be interested in knowing how I will identify the number of pages indexed before and after I start this project. Specifically, what utility will I use to differentiate between the newly indexed pages and the old?

So you can see I'm fairly new to the whole SEO world, but this looks like a great place to start. If there are other newbies out there, hopefully we'll all get something out of this.

GateKeeper

vBSEO will ensure that your core vBulletin forum is configured properly. There are other ways to make additional plugins *behave*. We do pretty well with the core application, plus CRRs, and even our extensions API.

There shouldn't be any sitemap issues. Just be sure you have our sitemap installed to capture all of your forum pages and have them transmitted to Google/Yahoo.

We use "site:yourname.com" to get your total indexed URLs in Google.

You are at the right place to learn about SEO. We have several experienced consultants lurking here that can help you with each topic you are investigating.

Welcome aboard!

Great. Thanks for the head start. I'll post all stats before I start in my next post. BUT, before I start, two questions.

1. I've read the installation instructions, but just curious if there is a primer or other type of documentation for the overall configuration (beyone installation), i.e. when to deply the 301 redirects, how to write and place the tags for the RRs, etc. I know there's a lot on this board, but it seems a bit scattered to try to pick up all the pieces when all I want is a place to read about the overall setup, etc. There's wasn't anything but the short installation guide in the software disctribution.

2. Is 3.0 out? Should I start with that release instead of 2.4?

Thanks in advance,
GateKeeper

Ok. No benchmark then. I'll just average the hit rate on the site/pages and see if I can correlate that way. Problem is that the search engines are changing their mind so often that I won't really ever know if this was a direct effect of vBSEO or just another "disturbance in the force".

On another note. What steps can I take to fold in ReviewPost as part of the vBSEO implementation? The forums are in a folder called "forums", and Review Post is in "resort-reviews". They share the same database. Is there anything I can do out of the gate to include these pages (we're talking 6000 pages if you include the category pages, or about 4200 of final product pages). Wouldn't that be nice!

GateKeeper

So we finally got the ball rolling on this yesterday. It took a bit to get the right "decoder ring", but the folks here helped a lot! Just needed to know where to put the latest and greatest version of the right file, i.e. OS, system type, PHP version, etc.
It's off to the races. What's in place is the default implementation, plus the one option to add relevant text links to the next and prev threads, althought that seems almost redundant if you're going to submit a sitemap with every forum and post in it anyway. But time will tell. A big thanks to the vBSEO staff for their help in getting this going.

I think Juan will be releasing XML files for recommended settings after the complete 3.0 release.

Afterall, he told me he was going to do this . Seriously, many of the settings are confusing for someone like me, I just ended up selecting yes blindly to the new features and running with it.

I did a check today, approximately 10 days after getting vBSEO installed and configured. Here are the updated stats.

Static pages indexed: 73 (Was 0 to start), so Google is indexing the new pages.

Total indexed pages: 96 (Was 166 to start) We'll keep an eye on this number and report back again in about 10 days.

Well, after over three months under the vBSEO umbrella, I checked recently and found only three pages are left on Google from the original 70 pages that were indexed before I started this project. Any thoughts?

There hasn't been any data loss, but possibly a reduction due to aging? There are some active threads that aren't indexed that used to be. For instance, the thread on Crimeshare was listed early on, but now Google doesn't even have it indexed. I think I'm being punished for installing this software. Has anyone else experienced this type of "shunning" by Google?