Did I waste money?

Ok So I was talking to someone more experienced with VB and he told me that I dont need vbseo and said it will cause issues for me told me to remove it and said then my rankings will be lower. What do I do? He said that search engines dont need friendly URLs anymore??? please advise I just want to improve my forum!

vBSEO does quite a bit more than just rewrite to friends URLs. You have not wasted your money.

There are plenty of haters out there for anything. You made the right choice coming here, and you will see in time for yourself that you made the correct decision.

As a customer I'm pretty happy with the results, although some results happened almost instantly most of the benefit comes long term.

Keep in mind that my forum is a very specialized to Mazda Pickup trucks which has a very limited audience.

Since installing the software my traffic from search engines has increased from 30% up to 50% of my total traffic and I've seen an additional 10% increase each month in returning visitors. These numbers have steadily increased over the last 6 months and continue to rise. There are a lot of tools and settings that as I learn how to use and adjust I see additional benefits.

There is a huge difference between being able to index a URL and optimizing it for content. A search engine can surely index all your pages without friendly URLs but it is very likely they won't appear on the first page of a search result. Optimizing the URL to contain keywords of the subject make it much more likely for that page to show up at the top of a search. A perfect example is one of my tech pages, the page used to be specs.html, more specifically it had specifications on the Mazda B2200 Pickup truck, but it never showed up in search results even though the page was indexed.

One day I simply changed the url to /mazda/B2200/specifications.html and the page got slammed with traffic, started showing up #1 on several different search results and a company emailed me asking to pay for a link on the page, that is what VBSEO helps do with your forum.

The funny thing is my biggest competitor saw a decrease in search ranks because I added his site to the black list and the hundreds of links in user posts on my site going to his suddenly had nofollow tags with them, lol.

Additionally having access to the customer forums on here has provided me a resource to learn more about SEO and has taught me how to make additional setup changes to my website that no software can do.