Critique Needed - Already established site

NextGenUpdate Gaming Forums

I've basically had vBSEO for over 4 years, on 2 different sites. This is my only site now, and it has been running strong but I just feel that I am not completely using vBSEO to it's potential. Any help would be greatly appreciated, and I'll get back to you on updates ASAP.

Hi,

I am pretty new here but reading other peoples posts they all advise to turn off your Archives

[How To] Completely Turn Off the vBulletin Archive

I donno if this would apply to your forum though, its pretty nice

Thanks for the pointer, made that change

Anyone other help is appreciated

A couple things I "dislike" about your site, and may not necessarily need to be changed:
- the use of /forums when there is absolutely nothing in root. Why? Having your main .com as a 301 really eats away ranking. It's probably too late to migrate to root, but you should consider putting something in root. And no, not vba or some other 'portal', but a real home page or articles /etc.
- the use of mods as they are, like 'vbookie'. Brand it yourself and make it yours. Don't use the generic mod name.
- inconsistent formatting of urls and locations.

ie,
nextgenupdate.com/forums/media
should at least be
nextgenupdate.com/forums/media/
but really it should be
nextgenupdate.com/forums/videos/
to match the content under it that it is the parent of


the same for the sub urls, like
nextgenupdate.com/forums/video-categories



Why have a 'home' and 'forums' tab when they go to the same place? Turn one off in vb settings. This stems from issue 1, where there is no home.

- I would re-order your forum home. You have a lot of noise and off-topic sections at the top, and all the gaming stuff at the bottom. This is backwards to me, and to bots that count content higher up with more weight.

First Let me thank Brian, He always makes great points.

Please try to accomplish these items too :

• Try to validate all of your Pages (especially Forums and threads) : : [Invalid] Markup Validation of http://www.nextgenupdate.com/forums/ - W3C Markup Validator
• Try to replace vBSEO Relevant Replacements with built in vBulletin Heading tags : VB4 RR's?
• Try to include only Showthread / forumdisplay / blog / CMS pages into vBSEO sitemap. - Try to use a CDN service (like MaxCDN.com) using vbseo CDN feature. (This will make your website to load faster) (** Note : When you finished this setting you should remove all of existing sitemap files and then regenerate the site map again)
• Try to remove any unimportant parts of the forum for guests, like > latest Last post | Avatars | Whats is going on box etc.
• Try to include your vBSEO sitemap in your robots.txt , I noticed that you have included your administrator area in robots.txt , never include your important areas like admincp or modcp in robots. and also try make another robots with more unnecessary urls/areas .
• Try to submit your website in Directories like DMOZ.

Always try to improve your pagespeed and website performances , you can check your website's performances here : WebPagetest - Website Performance and Optimization Test

Good Luck
Ali.Ch.

Hi Outsider,

Nice site you have! But do remove the 'Top' link from the right end of the top navbar, as it serves no purpose, it is only a distraction, and removing it will decrease the size of your html by a few bytes! :-)

Thanks for the pointers guys, definitely going to try implementing them Anything else is still appreciated if anyone notices anything.

Well, there was something else I was going to suggest at first, but you may not want to implement this change, so I was hesitant to mention it... When I open your Home page on my laptop, I don't even see the very first forum section on my screen because of the three advertisement units above it. I understand the ads generate income, and many other sites have them on top, too. However, I personally try to keep adverts away from the very top of my pages. Actually, I like to keep my Home, and other most popular landing pages, completely ads free.

Just an idea to contemplate... :-)

Thanks for the advice guys