SEO

History:

I have recently deployed vBSEO on my web site along with the Google Sitemaps tool that was developed by T2DMan utilizing the vBSEO URL rewrites. At the same time, I also upgraded from vBulletin 3.0.7 to 3.5.1. Prior to 3.5.1 and vBSEO I had been using my own Sitemaps script that queried the database and generated a sitemap that included showthread.php and showpost.php URLs for all publically accessible forums.

Pre-Upgrade I had over 800,000 pages indexed in Google with at least 100 pages worth of results cached as determined by a site:www.domain.com search.

Post-Upgrade I have 257,000 pages indexed in Google with 88 pages worth of those results cached using the same method described Pre-Upgrade.

Combine all of this with the ongoing Jagger issue and I'm confused as to what is causing this.

Pre-Upgrade I had several keywords that would place me in the #1 spot in the SERPs and several others that would still place me in the first 10 spots.

Post-Upgrade I can't find my site in the results for these same keywords ANYWHERE. According to the DigitalPoint Keyword Tracker i've dropped off the face of the earth for these keywords.

Questions:

Based on the situation described above, what portion of this is a naturally occuring transition when deploying vBSEO and changing the URLs with the vBSEO URL rewrite functionality?

Should any of this have had this type of impact on my SERPs for my top keywords? Or is that just convenient timing with the Jagger update at Google?

For those who have made this transition already, what is the normal timeframe for Google to purge what it sees as duplicate content and re-index and re-cache your site based on the changes made by vBSEO?

The caching and indexing is only half of the story I think. Google has indexed nearly all my new pages now, but it`s still at only 10% referral rate. I think the increase is coming when most pages get pagerank, and that pagerank get delegated back to the top pages. But I`m interested in success experiences too, so please let us know how the situation is, anyone that is at a more mature vbseo stage.

Anyone else with any info on the original post?

With google, the trick is patience.... especially when confusing the hell outta it with a switch as big as vbSEO. Google is now no doubt learning how your site hangs together and it's hierarchy.... once it's ready to, it will go out on it's usual crawl cycle... it shouldn't take that much longer... a few more days.

It is quite normal to drop a load of pages on google when switching to vbSEO... purely because this product removes a LOT of duplicate pages.

My traffic has remained constant throughout the entire process.....

I've had around 80,000 visitors arrive from google this month, so things are fine.

I would suggest a little more waiting.

__________________
Rob Collyer - SEO Specialist
StudentMidwife.NET

It's been about 3 weeks since I installed vBSEO and I'm really starting to see the shift now.

I still don't have 800,000 pages indexed. But here's the chain of events that occured for my site:

1) Installed vBSEO

2) The first week I started losing pages in Google like wildfire. I went from 800,000+ pages down to about 200 by the time the dust settled.

3) The second week pages came and went from Google. I would see the number rise and fall slightly and there was little actual indexing activity from Googlebot. Maybe 200-300 pages per day were scanned but very few of them showed up on the Google index.

4) The third week things started changing drastically. Google has been pounding my site daily with between 12,000 and 21,000 page views. My site: search in Google is showing the addition of several thousand pages per day and I'm back to over 80,000 pages indexed.

When I started using vBSEO I also noticed that my keywords dropped COMPLETELY from the SERPs on almost all search engines. Week 3 brought the return of those keywords to MSN and Yahoo, but Google still isn't showing up anything. I can't really attribute this to vBSEO though, I place the blame for the loss of my Google SERPS to the Jagger update.

I am closely monitoring the situation with both the McDar tools and the DigitalPoint Keyword Tracker on a daily basis to see which way the wind is blowing. (URLs for both at the bottom of this message for those unfamilliar with them).

I did make a number of template changes beyond what vBSEO modifies. Mostly in my viewpost and printthread templates. I'm still doing a little more tweaking to them, but overall I believe vBSEO will be quite valuable once all the dust settles.

DigitalPoint Keyword Tracker:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/

McDar's Datacenter Quick Check:
http://www.mcdar.net/Q-Check/datatool.asp

I installed in mid november. Google started making occasional visits a couple weeks ago, and has almost become a regular houseguest now. transition of vbseo pages started probably a week ago on google.

Now it is just a matter of which data center I check. some show 13 vbseo'd pages, some show 800. others are all in between.

I expect to be back up in the thousands within a couple weeks. Personally, I think for google this whole transition probably takes 4-5 months.

I agree with your time table there!