Is my website SEO friendly and optimised enough?

Hello everyone!

I hope i will not break any forum rules with this thread, but i am beginning to believe there is something really wrong with my vBulletin + vBSEO combo. That's why i've decided to ask you guys for help.

I am talking about my website. I've started it arround 3 years ago, and it soon became my "soul project". As i haven't got too many resources, i've tried to manage it myself. So i've bought vBSEO, tweaked everything i could and then hoped for the best.

Unfortunatelly, even i have more visitors and content than my other websites, it's really bad indexed by google and other search engines... and it's also very low in Page Rank (only 2 for forumhome and 3 for homepage). This is really bad, considering i've made blogs with less content and less visitors that in 6 months got Page Rank 4 and were fully indexed.

I've tried following a lot of resources regarding SEO optimisation and vBSEO masterminds advices. Unfortunatelly... i seem to be stuck. And even if i get more and more new members, more and more content, the website is seem to fall in Alexa rating also. It's really killing me (as i've spend all my money and resources to keep this project alive).

I am now using vBulletin 4.1.3 with vBadvanced CMPS 4.1.2, and of course latest vBSEO (3.6.0).

Can you guys please take a look at my website and tell me what do you see wrong? Or at least give me some advices... about what am i doing wrong and what's broken on the website.

Thank you very much!

Hello,

I reviewed your website, and here is my suggestions for you :

- First let me talk about Page Rank : PR has nothing to do with vBSEO, and to be honest its a useless thing , cause PR is kind of reputation which you gain when other websites with higher PRs put a link of your website in theirs so technically its a useless thing and I suggest you to never think about it.

- Your homepage : I noticed that you have SO MANY links / Videos etc in your homepage which lead to a high page load time which is awful for SEO, try to work on your page load time by decreasing the Videos/images/URLs and anything that has effect on your page speed.

- Try to validate all of your Pages (especially Forums and threads) : [Invalid] Markup Validation of http://www.consolegames.ro/ - W3C Markup Validator

- Try to replace vBSEO Relevant Replacements with built in vBulletin Heading tags : VB4 RR's?

- Try to remove any unimportant parts of the forum for guests, like > latest forum stats | Avatars | Whats is going on box etc.

- 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)

- Try to submit your website in Directories like DMOZ.

- Try to disable built-in vbulletin archive and sitemap : [How To] Completely Turn Off the vBulletin Archive

- 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.

Thank you very much A.Chakery for your help. Let me see if i understood correctly and what can i do to make the homepage better:

1. Forget about PR. Checked! Although i wouldn't to see it better

2. Homepage has too many links. Hmm, well... it was even bigger on this side (for example i have arround 20 news retrieved from the forums... untill now i got over 50). As about beeing slow, i am always testing on tools.pingdom.com/?url=www.consolegames.ro&treeview=0&column=objectI D&order=1&type=0 . Although the testing is beeing done from US (and i have an EU server), it's got only 7 seconds loadtime. For arround 2MB page, i think that's pretty fast. I've tried to optimise the server as better as i could (caching a lot and tweaking php/mysql). As for videos, there are only 5 of them. Shall i reduce them? I've seen websites with tons of videos on homepage...

3. About validating... yeah, i'm trying to do that all the time, but external addons are killing me. For example AddThis, Facebook, Twitter... I used to have 0 warnings and 0 errors on homepage untill i've started using external social plugins... Unfortunatelly that i can't fix :(

4. vBSEO Relevant Replacements, where can i find that in vBSEO Control Panel?

5. Removing irelevant stuff for guests: Going to do that now!

6. So shall i remove Member Profiles, Polls, Social Groups, Blogs, tags and Archive from the sitemap? As about the CDN, is that free? Can you tell me more, please!

7. As i've understood, Google doesn't take in his formula the Directories... Can you elaborate on this too? DMOZ is ODP - Open Directory Project ?

8. Disabling vbulletin archive right now (though i've noticed it's still ok on google). Also disabled internal sitemap.

Thanks a lot!

Edit: I still don't understand why there is such a small number of links in Google Webmaster Tools. I have on forum 48,218 Threads, 655,819 Posts and arround 18,000 Members. Although i'm submiting blogs, member pages, tag pages and so on... i only have arround 124,000 submitted URL's (and only 78,000 in web index). Isn't that too low?

I also have no ideea how to make the homepage more important. And also give a higher priority to a specified forum in the sitemap. For example, i want the most important thing to be the vBadvanced homepage and the News area... and it seems like it's impossible for me to set that. Any ideeas? Thanks in advance!

Here is what vBSEO sitemap generator is telling me:

Date	2011-10-21 06:31
Processing time	77.31 s
Total URLs	123,927 (-211)
Forumdisplay URLs	819 (-)
Showthread URLs	59,476 (+6)
ShowPost URLs	0 (-)
Archive URLs	0 (-218)
Member Profile URLs	18,066 (+1)
Poll Results URLs	272 (-)
Blog Entries URLs	114 (-)
Blog Tag URLs	0 (-)
Album URLs	15,165 (-)
Social Group URLs	97 (-)
Tag URLs	18,933 (-)
CMS URLs	0 (-)

Google	Successful
Bing	Successful
Yahoo	FAILED
Ask	Successful

Hello Daniel,
Its really My pleasure to help you

1. Forget about PR. Checked! Although i wouldn't to see it better

vBSEO RR method which Mert posted in that topic is so much better cause it includes your thread keywords as BOLD and ITALIC too, it makes it easy for google bots to get the main topic of your website.

2. Homepage has too many links. Hmm, well... it was even bigger on this side (for example i have arround 20 news retrieved from the forums... untill now i got over 50). As about beeing slow, i am always testing on tools.pingdom.com/?url=www.consolegames.ro&treeview=0&column=objectI D&order=1&type=0 . Although the testing is beeing done from US (and i have an EU server), it's got only 7 seconds loadtime. For arround 2MB page, i think that's pretty fast. I've tried to optimise the server as better as i could (caching a lot and tweaking php/mysql). As for videos, there are only 5 of them. Shall i reduce them? I've seen websites with tons of videos on homepage...

First always try to test your page using WebPagetest - Website Performance and Optimization Test which is sponsored by Google,
and 7 Sec is not really a good result Daniel, the lest time the better results.
and about the Video: its really up to you , but the point is decreasing the page load time , so I try to tell you every possible way to achieve it, the final decision will be up to you. and I think it would be so much better if you remove the Tag could too.

3. About validating... yeah, i'm trying to do that all the time, but external addons are killing me. For example AddThis, Facebook, Twitter... I used to have 0 warnings and 0 errors on homepage untill i've started using external social plugins... Unfortunatelly that i can't fix :(

Yeah always try to keep all of your pages validated , this will prevent any possible errors while Google bots are searching your website for contents. I have made a Validated Facebook/Twitter and Plus 1 Code using the vBSEO Virtual HTML feature , I hope it helps you : Valid XHTML Facebook/Twitter buttons Just for vBSEO Users

4. vBSEO Relevant Replacements, where can i find that in vBSEO Control Panel?

Yes, its in the vBSEO Control panel.

6. So shall i remove Member Profiles, Polls, Social Groups, Blogs, tags and Archive from the sitemap? As about the CDN, is that free? Can you tell me more, please!

Yes but not blogs , only include Showthread | Forumdisplay | CMS | Blogs .

This make the google bots to concentrate on the main content of your website.

7. As i've understood, Google doesn't take in his formula the Directories... Can you elaborate on this too? DMOZ is ODP - Open Directory Project ?

Well DMOz will help you to increase your pagerank. and its free

8. Disabling vbulletin archive right now (though i've noticed it's still ok on google). Also disabled internal sitemap.

vBulletin archive is just making Double contents which is awful for SEO.

Edit: I still don't understand why there is such a small number of links in Google Webmaster Tools. I have on forum 48,218 Threads, 655,819 Posts and arround 18,000 Members. Although i'm submiting blogs, member pages, tag pages and so on... i only have arround 124,000 submitted URL's (and only 78,000 in web index). Isn't that too low?

Its ok, cause google sometime do not index somepages like double contents or it takes sometime to index some pages, but don't worry about such things it happenes for all forums .

I also have no ideea how to make the homepage more important. And also give a higher priority to a specified forum in the sitemap. For example, i want the most important thing to be the vBadvanced homepage and the News area... and it seems like it's impossible for me to set that. Any ideeas? Thanks in advance!

I have no idea about this , I think vBSEO sitemap is doing it automatically, but for more information you can ask this question from vBSEO stuffs.

Hi Daniel,

Nice looking site you have! Congrats!

Unfortunatelly... i seem to be stuck. And even if i get more and more new members, more and more content, the website is seem to fall in Alexa rating also.

Hmm, you are NOT stuck, the content on your site is increasing, your membership base is growing. That's far more important than anything else.

Ali has given you excellent tips. I'd look into reducing the 2MB of your home page if at all possible. 300 to 500 kb would be more appropriate. You will not do it over night, but if you keep that number in your mind, keep removing unneeded stuff, optimize images, etc, and you will eventually get there.

I don't think search engines will automatically assign more importance to some of your pages only because you will attempt to assign more importance to them via your sitemap. Instead, interlink the more important pages more within your site. Generally speaking, more links pointing to a page helps.

Regarding CDN, since your site caters to a small geographical area (one country), you probably don't need a CDN. But I would, if at all possible, try to host the site within the country, so the speed is as best as it can be.

Thank you Marvin,

I have to say that Marvin has one of the best optimized vBulletin powered forums that I have seen so far.

I think on main, there should be index for SEO point of view, CMS decrease value of sections

Originally Posted by Marvin Hlavac

Hi Daniel,

Nice looking site you have! Congrats!

Hi Marvin and thank you for apreciation. I'm trying my best, although i'm far from good at this...

Originally Posted by Marvin Hlavac

Ali has given you excellent tips. I'd look into reducing the 2MB of your home page if at all possible. 300 to 500 kb would be more appropriate. You will not do it over night, but if you keep that number in your mind, keep removing unneeded stuff, optimize images, etc, and you will eventually get there.

I managed to optimise the homepage (mostly by rebuilding thumbnails and images in higher compression) to arround 1.2MB. Less than this it's almost impossible, as there are so many javascripts (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc..) and so many .css's that it's beyond me. I haven't been able to minimise the .css and javascripts...

Originally Posted by saqib_jutt

I think on main, there should be index for SEO point of view, CMS decrease value of sections

Can you please elaborate on that?

I managed to optimise the homepage (mostly by rebuilding thumbnails and images in higher compression) to arround 1.2MB. Less than this it's almost impossible, as there are so many javascripts (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc..) and so many .css's that it's beyond me. I haven't been able to minimise the .css and javascripts...

Daniel for JS and CSS files you should use a plugin to combine and minify them, unfortunately I dont have enough knowledge about VB4 plugins so I think it would be great if you ask this question at vb.org.

Daniel,

Congrats on the 2MB to 1.2 MB size reduction! That has helped!

The following link lists all the image files which load when your home page opens:

http://www.webpagetest.org/pageimage...run=1&cached=0

Each image file, no matter how small, is an individual http request, and costs you time. It is a good list to go over, and see if you could change a few things to reduce the number of http requests, reduce the number of images, etc.

I had to edit the above link because the "Retrieve title from URL" feature rendered the link unusable.

MonkY, Index gives value to popular built-in structure while CMS can optimized according to specific needs, If you cant manage CMS for better SEO specifications than stick to index

Saqib, you have a valid point. Unless a site has a really good reason for using a CMS, it may be better for both, users and SEO, to use the forum index as the Home page.

Even with forum index as the Home page, it still is possible, if needed, to highlight interesting threads/reviews/products/etc by for example adding a sidebar or two to the home page. (See an example of such home page I use: www . laptopgpsworld . com)