Critique CODForums please.

Here's what is troubling me: While the site is ranking at #1 for both CODForums, and COD Forums, it seems to suffer at SEO horribly - Why? Because its on vB4.

I have been using analytics since April 15th, and the 'only' keywords are anything related to CODForums - every single variation you can think of. And what's more scary is that nobody's searching "Call of Duty," "Modern Warfare 3" or "Black Ops" to find our site. That makes me worried.

I have a competing Call of Duty forum. Just take out the 's' from CODForums and voila, you have another vb4 website, and that website is much, much, MUCH younger than CODForums. Yet, it gains more members, more bots/visitors per day than I have in a week. I have tried to buy the site out, but the owner is greedy to the point of wanting over 5 thousand dollars.

Here's what boggles my mind: CODForums is much older, this site was created in October 2003 - the year that Call of Duty started to thrive. The competing CODForum was created in May 2010. Sit back for a second, look at the glaring difference. How is it that CODForum is able to get 50 to a hundred members per day? I'll tell you how: He was using "Call of Duty: Black Ops" in the title tag. I decided to use CODForums in my title tag because google does not like confusing titles, at all. Between May 2010 and July 2011, they have gathered more than 2,700 members, and CODForums only got a measely 2,200 and about a quarter half of them are bots.

CODForums' vB3 instance was created in June of 2009, when Modern Warfare 2 was about to release. Right now, I've been getting ready for the release of Modern Warfare 3, so I need to use the next 2 months wisely.

When the previous owner bought the domain from someone else, he moved his site to a dedicated server and got himself a beautiful vb3 license, and a custom-made design that was amazing. When I bought it off him, I tried to move it to our server, but the problem is that the previous owner was using an older php, and an older server backend. FYI, I never wanted to leave vb3, but when we moved it to our server on vb3, there was a lot of errors. So, I upgraded, only to find that most of the skins got messed up.

But alas, I still believe that I have made a really good investment. I have tried banking on facebook, and twitter on getting us traffic... If there's one disadvantage that CODForum has, its that someone else already took the CODForum twitter. The advantages that I have is that I own a black ops blog, and a modern warfare 3 blog - called "MW3Blog." And I've been using both blogs to direct visitors to CODForums.

So, vBSEO, what can I do to widen that keyword net? I am using the latest version of vBSEO.

What can I do to push more SEO on the site? I have had a lot of success with MW3Blog, and MVC3Forum. I want to push to the next level and get ready for MW3.

Oh, and yes, I have sitemap 3 installed.

Hello,

I reviewed your website,

First make sure that you are using the latest vBulletin version.

I think the main problem of your website is Load Time and Page Size, for example your background is more than 200KB and its kind of big for Google. Always try to choose more Simple and faster designs, I know using a Nice Background and enhanced jqueries make websites to look great but its about the speed. and also try to use less PNG images.

SO I think that would be better if you use a faster design.

and Here is more suggestions :

• Try To replace vBSEO Relevant Replacements with built in vBulletin Heading tags : VB4 RR's?
• Try to use a forum url structure either with www or non-www (I suggest you to use non-WWW coz WWW is deprecated) >[How to] Setup www.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com (www vs. non-www) - With .htaccess 301 redirects
• Try to block more un-wanted URLs using Robots.txt (here is an example : Download robots txt)
• Try to include only Showthread / forumdisplay / blog pages in your sitemap
• Try to remove Calendar and FAQ only for guests
• I noticed that you have some errors in your style codes , try to solve all of them : [Invalid] Markup Validation of http://codforums.com/ - W3C Markup Validator
• Try to use a CDN service (like MaxCDN.com) using vbseo CDN feature and replacement Variables, NOTE: Its great for speeding up the page load of your website.
• Try to submit your website in Directories like DMOZ.

AND if you really wanna have great results try to check your Web Page Performance at WebPagetest - Website Performance and Optimization Test, then try to improve your performance.

Good Luck.
Ali.Ch.

I have a question, does the virtual display code work in today's vBSEO? I recently changed my welcome box.

If you mean Virtual HTML Display, the answer is Yes, it does.

I am also using it to validate some dynamic parts of my website.

Regards.

I would like a moderator to close this thread. I have moved the instance to xenforo.