vBSEO made no difference...

I have a sports forum (vB 3.8.3) (Sports Central Message Boards | The Ultimate Sports Fan Community) with almost 300,000 posts that's mature (online since 2001). I installed vBSEO a few weeks ago and have seen no increase in traffic whatsoever, despite the search engines indexing a lot more pages and my sitemaps being submitted via vBSEO. vBSEO says it's pinging all the search engines successfully, the total URLs is 323,814 (up), etc.

Basically, it's all setup and working properly, but I'm getting no benefit from it. Where is the increased traffic?

Hi Marc,

A few weeks is about when things start working. It doesn't happen over-night.

You also have several areas of room for improvement that I would address:

• validate your template. you have a few minor errors [Invalid] Markup Validation of http://www.sports-central.org/community/boards/index.php - W3C Markup Validator
• remove the archive: [How To] Completely Turn Off the vBulletin Archive
• add some heading structure: [How To] Add H1 Tags to your vBulletin Templates for Long Tail Search Optimization

Those are just a couple quick tips. I'd suggest making a post in our vBulletin SEO Discussion - Critique Please at vBSEO.com forum to get further advice.


In the long run, you're about half way there. Perform a few more tweks, and sit tight.

Thanks, I fixed the first two things and am gonna try the H1 tags, but they are posing a problem. The first option provided white text on my gray gradient background and looked liked crap. The third option just put H1 text around my forum title and repeated the title right beneath where it was already labeled, so it looked bad and out of place. Haven't tried the second option, but how much of a difference do the H1 tags really make? They make my forum look like crap.

remove the archive: [How To] Completely Turn Off the vBulletin Archive

I had the professional installation, should that have been done for me?

vBSEO - Installation Service

That is not covered on the installation service.

So does it need to be done? will I see a benefit

Some people keep it. Some do not.

Why the vBulletin archive is useless and counterproductive

Thanks I shall have a read one last question regarding the htaccess file that was uploaded could you see if it looks ok? Should the part that says "yourdomain" have my forums address?

# Comment the following line (add '#' at the beginning)
# to disable mod_rewrite functions.
# Please note: you still need to disable the hack in
# the vBSEO control panel to stop url rewrites.
RewriteEngine On
# Some servers require the Rewritebase directive to be
# enabled (remove '#' at the beginning to activate)
# Please note: when enabled, you must include the path
# to your root vB folder (i.e. RewriteBase /forums/)
#RewriteBase /
#RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.com
#RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/forums/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^((urllist|sitemap_).*\.(xml|txt)(\.gz)?)$ vbseo_sitemap/vbseo_getsitemap.php?sitemap=$1 [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(admincp/|modcp/|cron|vbseo_sitemap)
RewriteRule ^((archive/)?(.*\.php(/.*)?))$ vbseo.php [L,QSA]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !/(admincp|modcp|clientscript|cpstyles|images)/
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ vbseo.php [L,QSA]

No it shouldn't, since it's already disabled by # at the beginning

Thanks

You are welcome

That guide you posted to turn off the archive it says (Remember to have your config_vbseo.php CHMOD to at least 666)

Where is the config_vbseo.php located?

forum root/includes/ from your FTP

Hey, you hijacked my thread, dude!

I turned off the vB archive and validated my template. But how important are the H1 tags? I tried two of the methods and both placed redundant text on my page (i.e. the title of the site/thread listed a second time beneath the normal vB navigation), so it looked sloppy and unnecessary.

well seemed pointless starting a new one for the same thing :P

Could I ask how you validated your template? I went to that website and I have 56 errors. How am I supposed to dort them out?