SEO

It's been 3 months since I installed vBSEO.

Over the past 3 months, as you can see from the attached Google Analytic chart, my organic traffic has absolutely NOT increased. In fact it even decreased a little bit.

I've done everything experts say I should do: I have sitemap generator, robots.txt, and turn this on or off. And, yes I've been through 'Stuff to Do First'. Didn't everything list there but I don't suppose everyone did everything on 'Stuff to Do First'.

What the hell is going on?

I have some 5000 threads and 20000 posts but Google organic traffic has been around 30-40 visits a day. This has been extremely frustrating.

Can some expert from vBSEO perform a check or audit on my site?

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Hello Andy ,

It may be wise to share a link to your site also since other members can critique your site also.

Here are my suggestions :

1. You have too many adds on your site , i personally would lower the number of adds you display on your forumindex.
2. If you want to keep sidebar i would move it from left to right so that it will not show up before your content.
3. You should turn welcome headers into an image [HOW-TO] Make your Welcome Headers an image!
4. You should use Relevant Replacemet option.
5. Your site can be reached both with www. and non www. domains. You should choose one and 301 redirect the other one. [How to] Setup www.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com (www vs. non-www) - With .htaccess 301 redirects
6. Default vBulletin theme is not really good on page SEO optimizations. You may consider getting a new style or install vBSEO style which has more SEO optimizations.
7. I will also disable vBulletin archieve as it is pretty useless when you have vBSEO installed
8. On your showthread pages the amount of adds you have is honestly disturbing imo. I would definately remove some of them.
9. You have 4.633 threads on your site however only 1681 is open to guest access. Keep in mind that bots cannot index threads which they cannot access. You should consider opening your hidden section to guest access.

__________________
Mert Gökçeimam / Crawlability Inc.
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Hi Mert,

Thanks a bunch. Could you please advise how to do No. 4 and No. 9?

And why is No. 9? I thought all my threads are open to guests and I wasn't even aware of any hidden section. Why only 1/3 of threads end up opening to guests? How to open hidden section to guest access?

And, I've done 301 redirect but somehow it only works with main URL(typing www.xxx.com will be redirected to xxx.com, but typing www.xxx.com/forums will not be redirected to xxx.com/forums)

And, yes I will try to do the rest you said.

For number 4 you may check
[How to] Setup Relevant Replacements with vBSEO
RRs for vBSEO.com
Relevant Replacements used by vbseo.com?

For number 9 i calculated your thread number on forumhome. Make sure you have give full access to guests for all forum permissions expect your staff forum.

What is your .htaccess within inside forums folder ?

Here's .htaccess in forums folder. I have another .htaccess file under site root directory because my site is a social networking site integrated with vB - this is why I had 301 permanent redirect.

I will check the rest. No. 9 seems odd to me, if the numbers don't add up.

# Comment the following line (add '#' at the beginning)
# to disable mod_rewrite functions.
# Please note: you still need to disable the hack in
# the vBSEO control panel to stop url rewrites.
RewriteEngine On

# Some servers require the Rewritebase directive to be
# enabled (remove '#' at the beginning to activate)
# Please note: when enabled, you must include the path
# to your root vB folder (i.e. RewriteBase /forums/)
#RewriteBase /

#RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.com
#RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/forums/$1 [L,R=301]

RewriteRule ^((urllist|sitemap_).*\.(xml|txt)(\.gz)?)$ vbseo_sitemap/vbseo_getsitemap.php?sitemap=$1 [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(admincp/|modcp/|cron)
RewriteRule ^((archive/)?(.*\.php(/.*)?)?)$ vbseo.php [L,QSA]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^(admincp|modcp|clientscript|cpstyles|images)/
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ vbseo.php [L,QSA]

Please use the following , but please donot forget to replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name.

Hi Mert,

Correct me if I am wrong, but this seems to me it will redirect www.xxx.com to www.xxx.com/forums, which is not what I want. www.xxx.com is my homepage which is not forum home.

I am now using URL without www. So if someone types www.xxx.com/forums he should be redirected to xxx.com/forums

As the .htaccess file is located inside forums folder it will only effect the urls inside forums folder. Thats why you donot need to worry.

Hi Mert,

What I need is the other way around.

When user types www.domain.com/forums he should be redirected to domain.com/forums

With your change, when a user types domain.com/forums he will be redirected to www.domain.com/forums, which is incorrect.

My site is being indexed as domain.com without www.

Please change
lines with

Thanks! This seems to work.

I found out about the 'hidden' section (No. 9 you mentioned). It looks they are forums that receive RSS news feed. I hide them so that they are invisible on forum home(I am not using those forums for now). But if someone knows the URL of those forums they can still access them as guest. Would this affect SEO?

If that section and threads are listed in your sitemaps you may be good to go but hiding the content from bots may not be that great idea.

Ok. with all the suggested changes, Another 6 weeks past, and with total 4+ month of vBSEO in action, I still see absolutely no increase whatsoever in organic traffic.

Looks like vBSEO isn't for me