User activity up after vb4 upgrade?

For anyone that has upgraded from vb3.8 to vb4 - did you notice any rise in new member registrations, daily posts, etc?

Have you experienced an initial decrease in hits and then a rise in hits due to search engine reindexing?

Someone please answer tavenger5. Im after the same information from people that have taken the plunge.

Personally I doesn't use vb4 at my forums, And I'll not plan to upgrade my forum to vb4 in this year I need to wait for some more versions of vb4.

I've never heard of a traffic/activity increase after vB4 upgrade; but many traffic drop stories are there at vB.com.

Also there shouldn't be a massive reindexing if your urls are the same.

With a vB3 -> vB4 change people are still seeing a period of reindexing as even though the URL's aren't changing the structure and code content has changed enough that google and other SE with mark it as substantially changed. This can cause a drop in indexing for a short period while they re-evaluate the site.

However it tends to be over a lot sooner than a full re-index and in our personal experience vB4 sites are actually getting greater ranking after this period in general.

I know this is atleast true for my personal sites and we seen the same here at vBSEO.com there was an initial drop in SERPS and some pages were removed completely then after a few days the pages were back and everything was better than ever before.

Well it's good to hear that google is ranking the vb4 pages a little higher.

Fortunately, I don't really have that problem with vb3.8 though - there's lots of traffic coming from google, but that traffic just isn't using the site as much as I'd like. I don't expect it to be as simple as a redesign, which is what users will see vb4 as from the member side, but I guess I will have to see for myself since every community has their own dynamic. I do think vb4 makes more sense to people that haven't been using message boards for a long time.

VB4 out the box in my opinion looks rough.
Im an advocate of one skin designer thats got a bit of a poor name for their skin support.
A VB4 site skinned, looks a totally different beast. $35 and you have a decent looking site.
When I have both my live site and development site open on the computer or two computers side by side showing the before and after, you cant put the VB3.8 site in the same league for looks.

But its getting the true feedback. Not the same old, same old on vb.com complaining about loss of traffic etc, legs falling off, global recession being caused by upgrading to VB4

As the saying goes, you can recommend something to someone and two people will be told, complain and twenty will be told.

My traffic is pretty much same as one month ago, when I went from 3.8 to 4.0, people didnt like the changes at first but after few days they like it better than the old one. They just need to get used to it.

Originally Posted by Lee G

VB4 out the box in my opinion looks rough.
Im an advocate of one skin designer thats got a bit of a poor name for their skin support.
A VB4 site skinned, looks a totally different beast. $35 and you have a decent looking site.
When I have both my live site and development site open on the computer or two computers side by side showing the before and after, you cant put the VB3.8 site in the same league for looks.

But its getting the true feedback. Not the same old, same old on vb.com complaining about loss of traffic etc, legs falling off, global recession being caused by upgrading to VB4

As the saying goes, you can recommend something to someone and two people will be told, complain and twenty will be told.

I couldn't agree more with the styling discussion. That is the one thing that moving to a CSS based style has really made simple and very effective, you can basically get the site to look however you want and make it SO different from the original design that if you also get the copyright removal some people would find it very hard to determine it is actually vBulletin.

I would say of the traffic side of thing that people definitely should expect to see drastic increases just because they changed, and if that is the only reason for changing you are going to be disappointed. However if you are changing because of the other features that have been added like native FB Open Graph support and CSS based style system then you will be happy to know that at least in my experiences there does tend to be a slight increase above and beyond the organic growth when using vB4 and vBSEO3.5 together.

Are you guys that are saying that you are doing better since upgrading, finding that VB4.oh series also attracts members as well as an increase in posting from members or it it having the opposite effect?
Increase in hits, general down turn in new members or are they going hand in hand or even encouraging more people to post with the new bigger buttons etc?