Tracking www.forums.greecemonkey.eu

[greecemonkey]

Hello Seo'ers

My forum is called GreeceMonkey and is part of a group of website I own and run on all the resorts and towns in Greece.

I have had the forums a few years now, and never tryed to do anything with Adsense or any kind of SEO. The forums at the moment have about 500,000 posts and about 50,000 threads. I have done many SEO projects before but none of them on my sites. Having done this, I know this is going to take 6 months or more before I can judge the impact of VBSEO on my forums. Regardless of how it effects google I would have done it anyway as I have a real dislike to querystring varables in URLs.

I installed vbseo about a month ago, and seen what I consider in to be an improvment.

When I started I had the following links in google.

Google 19,000
Yahoo 1,500
MSN 250

I have done a lot of digging around with google, and checked the states between data centers, and also using different googles, mainly google.com, google.co.uk, and google.gr they improve in different ways and also increase link count in different amounts. In this case google.co.uk will change first and google.com will follow about 2-3 days later. At the moment the link count is changing about once a week, and increasing by about a 1000 with google. The others are increasing by about the same %% increase as google.

My fourns a very messy and need a lot of work to get them to how I want them to look and operate, but so far VBSEO is doing exactly what it says.

My site maps as below, this is as of yesterday

Forum Display: 3195
Show Thread: 106151
Show Post: 765135
Member Profiles: 9982
Poll Results: 44
Archive: 982

I am playing with the ad colours at the moment, and in my experance high contrast ads dont work as well as ads that blend into the forums.

I can double my CTR for 48 hours on the forums, just by moving them to the other side of the forums. People get used to them, and I move them back and the CTR doubles again.

As I am looking at this as a long term project, I wil still have a lot of questions over the coming months.

I have divided my fourms, into Greek islands, and Greek resorts. So at the moment, I have

Top Level >>>
Island Forums container (act as forum = NO)
Island Forums
Resort Forums Container (act as forum = NO)
Resort Fourms

For example the Greek Island of Crete:-

Container Island URL = Crete General Forums - GreeceMonkey Discussion Forums
Container Resort URL = Agios Nikolaos - GreeceMonkey Discussion Forums
Resort URL = Welcome to Agios Nikolaos - GreeceMonkey Discussion Forums

I beleive that google add a lot of weight if the search term apears in the URL (more if it is in the domain part of the URL)

I am thinking of changing the above already so the name of the island apears in the URL for the resorts would be /agios-nikolaos-crete for the container.

On to the import information now

In 4 weeks, I have seen and am very happy with the results below

Google now at 25,500
Yahoo now 1,793
MSN 421

I link to the forums from other sites not just within VB, so I have links for example on the crete site linking to the Crete section of the forums - this seems to have helped a lot

I have not looked at the IIS log file in detail, but I can say it jumped two days after sending the first sitemap, and has remained at about 90,000KB a day.

I will keep this updated as best I can - any advice will be greatly received.

Graham
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[Joe Ward]

Do you have Google Analytics?

[greecemonkey]

I have had it installed for about the last two months.

Will it produce different stats if it is in vbseo rather than the footer template ?. Does it count exactly the same regardless of its position.