Patientenfragen.net - vBSEO Case Study

Hi

I have a German forum for medical patients to talk about medical and non medical topics.



Link: Patientenfragen.net ... wir haben die Antworten (German Version)
Link: Patientenfragen.net ... we have the answers (English Version)

The forum runs since 2006/05/05


I bought and installed vBSEO on 2007/07/20 including vBSEO Sitemap Plugin

This Thread is a long term CASE STUDY.
Last update: 2010/10/22

(If you only see old images that don't match the update date please press CTRL + R to force your browser to reset cache!)


This Case Study ends after 3 Years

After 3 Years of maintaining this case study I decided to stop making all my statistics public.
I think there comes a point for a thriving business where making their stats so public
does more harm then good. I hope you enjoyed the journey as well as I did and maybe
you learned a few things from my experiments. I still visit this forum so you can ask me
any questions you like. As last gift to all the followers of my case study I made a last update.
Enjoy and thank you for watching my project grow.

Important events that may have had impact on my traffic:

2007/07: Installation of vBSEO + vBSEO Sitemap plugin
2007/10: Google PR Update -> PR 3 to PR 5
2008/09: Removed vBulletin Archive and Footer Links to Archive, removed Forum Title from Showthread, Forumdisplay and Memberinfo replaced showpost with permlinks
2009/02: We had some Server Issues for 5 weeks with slow speeds and sometimes being not reachable. Google PR dropd from 4 to 3
2009/08: around that time Google PR dropped to 0 (possibly because of the Google Caffeine update or because we are selling direct Links on our Forum, who knows? ;))
2010/01: Installed vBEnterpriseTranslator which automatically translates the forum into English via Google Translator
2010/03: Added Pictures next to my Adsense Ads in Threads and switched loading sequenze of Adsense Ads to have the Ads in the Thread loaded before the one below the Navbar
2010/04: Upgraded to vBulletin 4.x. Installed vBOptimise Pro, vBSupercharged, and optimised webpage load time by serving some stic content via cookieless domains. Also removed images next to google Ads because of violation of google TOS (I asked them). Furthermore I changed the 2 large rectangles as second post in threads to one large rectangle as second post and one large rectangle as last post on each thread page.
2010/05 further worked on page speed (with pagespeed and yslow) by optimising and serving images from static cookieless domains.
2010/06 made an exclusive contract with a direct advertising sales company. Adsense earnings will go down, total earnings for me will go up
2010/08 My Forum got hacked and a JS Redirect was installed to redirect traffic from google. Also all URL Rewrites were changed and had to be reestablished via 301 redirects. It took about 12 days to reach old traffic levels and the decrease is visible in all graphs.
2010/09 Deactivated Adsense Interest based Ads. Activated "Images + Text" Ads for all my Ad Spots. Introduced the Large Rectangle and the Big Welcome Text below the navigation.
2010/10 Deactivated all rel=nofollow attributes (internal and external)


Statistics:

Indexing stats (Indexed pages in search engines - Tracking DISCONTINUED!)
Old Graphs can be found as attachments

Traffic stats (organic traffic from search engines)


(Y-axis normal scale)


(Y-axis logarithmic scale)


Keyword Long Tail:




Google Adsense earnings:
Here is a graphical representation of my adsense earning.
I changed the scale of the Y-achsis to an odd interval and removed the numbers so you can't guess the income, but I think you will get the idea ;)

The Graph for earnings up to January 2009 in USD can be viewed as Attachment.

Since Adsense changed payment from USD to EUR I made a new Graph for earnings in EUR starting January 2009:



Here is another interesting graph that displays Adsense earnings in comparison to the unique visitors per month:



I have worked hard on the optimal integration of Google Adsense into my forum and I think that I found the near optimum for use of Adsense on a vBulletin Forum.


Interested now and you did not visit my forum yet?

Go for it:

Link: Patientenfragen.net ... wir haben die Antworten (German Version)
Link: Patientenfragen.net ... we have the answers (English Version)

StarBuG

I also posted this case study on digital point here:
vBSEO - an independent case study

Hallo StarBuG,

wirklich ein sehr schönes und übersichtliches Forum.

Ich freue mich auf eine Erfolgsstory von dir

Danke, bin auch schon gespannt.

Wenn es gut läuft, kauf ich mir auch für mein 2tes Forum Elternfragen.net - Für Eltern mit medizinischen Fragen rund um Kinder eine Lizenz

Hallo,

das würde mich freuen

Thank-you for sharing your case study with us. I'm looking forward to seeing your reports.

Stats updated.

And second vBSEO License bought

Next update posted

Next update posted.

A drop has occurred, but that was to be expected

next week, new stats

Sorry for the late update.

I have added traffic stats too to the case study to see if there is a significant impact on SE Traffic.
I have also added the last two month before installing vBSEO to see the normal trend my website had.
This allows to rate the impact of vBSEO more objectively

Enjoy

Even though only 5 days have past since my last update (the last one was late) I added the new stats to get back on the right time schedule of updates

Next update

Originally Posted by StarBuG

Traffic stats (organic traffic from search engines)

20.05.-20.06. (two month before vBSEO was installed)

google: 10,601
yahoo: 225
msn: 9

20.06.-20.07. (month before vBSEO was installed)

google: 13,312
yahoo: 115
msn: 4

21.07.-21.08. (first month with vBSEO installed)

google: 18,154
yahoo: 133
msn: 6

I'd be interesting watching this graphically represented.

Looking forward to your next reports.

Done

I also posted the graph with a logarithmic achsis so the low traffic from yahoo and msn compared to google can be better differentiated.

Excellent. Moving forward, I suspect a better assessment will be possible by including more pre-vBSEO months into the analysis. Let's see how it goes.

Again, thanks for sharing this test case with the community.