Progress Report

I just purchased vbseo this morning and thought I would try to start an ongoing review thread to monitor the progress of our site after the installation. First and foremost, I know nothing about SEO, vaguely understand how Google's PR system works and try to focus strictly on site content. Our site is www.reefland.com, a site for Saltwater Aquarium Hobbyists which contains a forum with almost 7,000 members, 15,500 threads and 110,000 posts. We also have a photo gallery with nearly 2,700 images, an online e-zine published bi-monthly and an in house online aquarium logging system where members can document and keep track on their aquariums. We get on average 5 new members per day and since this is really the stat that we watch (conversions if you will) this will be our benchmark. I think our Google PR is like 3 on http://www.reefland.com.

The number of pages that Google shows indexed in 592 using site:www.reeefland.com as the search string.

Performing the same search at Yahoo! results in 81,700 pages (not sure if this is the right string for Yahoo!).

Again the same string in MSN shows 566 results (again not sure if this is the right string for MSN).

Google used to happily crawl our site but after changing the default age to "the beginning", I think we took a hith with Google due to the rapid increase in information...as I have read. Over the past 4-5 days, it has been making a return.

I hope to be able to install vbseo today and will follow-up in this thread with progress reports. If anyone has any initial ideas I would be happy to listen. I hope that by purchasing vbseo and becoming active in the community that I will get not only good URL's but tips from other SEO guru's.

Alrighty, vbseo has been installed and also took the time to install the Google/Yahoo! sitemap generator and submitted to both. We'll see how this all goes.

Day 1 update.

Google - 987 pages indexed - 0 vbseo
Yahoo - 88,400 pages indexed - 3 vbseo
MSN - 566 pages indexed - 14 vbseo

I see you have a couple of vbseo result already - Did you install the sitemap?

Hi Juan, I did install the sitemap. Here is aday 2 report:

Google - 11,200 pages indexed
Yahoo! and MSN - No Change.

That was a significant boost for Google though!

An update:

Google - 17,700 pages indexed
Yahoo - 87,600 pages indexed
MSN - 660 pages indexed

An update:

Google - 24,700 pages indexed
Yahoo - 86,300 pages indexed
MSN - 583 pages indexed

It has been a long time since I have reported anything. When I was viewing the Bot activity log, I realized I have recently received a deep crawl by Google finally.

Googlebot 16,704

Thought that was worth sharing. Also since installing, new traffic to my site from Google has went from 15% to 30%.

Great news, glad to hear that

I see you are not using the Relevant Replacements feature. I feel it 'd give your site a good boost...

btw - SE's might not like the blue over blue for the vbseo link.. you can either CSS it to display in another color or select a non-linked version of the copyright via your config_vbseo.php file (near the bottom)

Hi Juan,

I have been playing with a new style and trying to incorporate the use of RR's:
http://www.reefland.com/forum/reef-a...html?styleid=4

Right now I only have it on showthread, but am looking at adding it elsewhere (forumdisplay, etc.). Also, thanks for the tip on the VBSEO link, I wasn't aware there was a way to change it in the config file, I'll take a look. It drove me crazy from an appearance standpoint.