Please Critque my forum, it's been 6+ months with vBSEO

[goaliecrease]

http://www.goaliecrease.net

I've done a lot of tinkering, and I'm sure there's a lot that I've missed. I'm only a year in to the site, and I still have a ton to learn on how to get the best performance out of my site. I obviously want to get the best ranking possible, in my very small niche market of Goalies.

[Brian Cummiskey]

Set your CMS to root.
vBSEO 3.5 Release Candidate 1 is here! - vBulletin SEO Forums


i think the most notable issue for your site is that it's VERY slow. Speed/page load time is a big factor in SEO today.
You may need to move hosts or upgrade to a less oversold shared server to increase performance
run it through a service like WebPagetest to see a breakdown.

I would remove "the best on the web" from your title as it is generic, and most se's block superlatives anyway. Put something more useful/on target in there, or remove it altogether

[goaliecrease]

You can see my speed is getting better, but I'm going to focus on fixing it this week. Thanks.

[goaliecrease]

i think the most notable issue for your site is that it's VERY slow. Speed/page load time is a big factor in SEO today.

You may need to move hosts or upgrade to a less oversold shared server to increase performance
run it through a service like WebPagetest to see a breakdown.

Any tips on helping me speed this up? Are any of the mods good? Anything within vBSEO to help speed it up?

[goaliecrease]

Set your CMS to root.
vBSEO 3.5 Release Candidate 1 is here! - vBulletin SEO Forums

I followed the first step, but I believe my settings were already good on the /forums/ portion of that post, right?

[Brian Cummiskey]

It's the shared database that seems to be the slow part. Not much you can do with your current platform. And yes, you just needed to set the CMS home setting.

[goaliecrease]

It's the shared database that seems to be the slow part. Not much you can do with your current platform. And yes, you just needed to set the CMS home setting.

I actually have the database also on a virtual private server.

[Brian Cummiskey]

You can see the 'waiting for first byte' time of over 2 seconds. This is the database 'wait' more than anything while it finds the data and processes the php/etc. Perhaps it just needs to be tuned up. Run your optimization and repair scripts against it.

[goaliecrease]

Set your CMS to root.
vBSEO 3.5 Release Candidate 1 is here! - vBulletin SEO Forums

Now that I've done this, what about all the people that had the www.goaliecrease.net/content/ as their bookmark?

[Brian Cummiskey]

You can make a custom redirect:

'^content/$' => '/'

[goaliecrease]

I cut and pasted your code to the custom rewrite rules, and I still get...

vBulletin Message

Invalid Forum specified. If you followed a valid link, please notify the admin

[Brian Cummiskey]

try in htaccess instead:

RewriteRule ^/content$ http://www.goaliecrease.net/ [L,R=301]

this should come directly above the sitemap rule in htaccess.

[goaliecrease]

What are you doing to me...?!?!

Now www.goaliecrease.net shows "Page not found".

[Brian Cummiskey]

If things don't work, don't leave them up... take it down.

That should go in your ROOT htaccess file, not in /forums.

[goaliecrease]

It was in the root, not in the forums. I removed it right away. But I'm trying to sit here right now and get it all straightened out.