Please review (lots to learn)

Here's my site:

www.MysteryTutorVault.com

I've got a lot to learn and work on. Here are a few problems I'm having:

1.Just about everything is stuck in the supplemental index
2. The only traffic i get from google is people specifically searching for my site
3. vBadvanced is giving me trouble; everything I put on my homepage shows up on the forum page, so they're identical in content except the forum page has the forum and the homepage doesn't. Which obviously sucks.

Have you purchased or sold any links? Since you appear in the supplemental index, it would appear that you received some kind of penalty?

When did your site first launch? When did you add vBSEO?

Has your forum been offline for any length of time, or did you have more than 1 URL set up to access the site?

I would like to see a "tag line" in your logo that instantly defines what "Mystery Tutor Vault means for first time visitors.

I would like to see you add a "Forum" tab at the top in the gray navigation tabs.

I like that you are trying to reel people in with your video, but it takes up too much space at the top. Normally, I might suggested converting this to an image. This is not possible in your case due to the media content and prohibitive size.

Why not try reducing the video in size and moving it up right into your header space, so that everyone visiting your site can still see the video, but it will be in the header instead and all the repeated text will be removed.

Your site name is repeating on each sub-forum and thread page. You should remove that.

You should use our replace showpost with Permalink option on thread pages.

Since vBA is not giving you any significant benefits and may be creating issues, you should consider removing it. You can find another way to focus attention on the "Official SAT Study Guide".

I do not like the top 10 stats when made available for guests and search engines as well.

Doing an extensive review of your site, by checking each item in these resources:

Your Site Review - Stuff to Do First

Briansol's Ultimate Guide to vBSEO

BTW - You are not showing up as a vBSEO owner. We have another username assigned to your forum URL. Please have them add your username to their account details as an authorized "Priority Support User".

1) rename your 'test' forums. 'test' to google is probably showing up as a test page, not an SAT practice test page. try 'practice exam' instead.
2) remove vbadvanced if all your going to use it for is a re-peat of the forums. that video/welcome header is absurd. It's nearly my entire viewport-- and i have a 30" monitor.
3) verify your license here with the staff. you aren't showing as a customer.
4) install my settings file from my guide.

Those will fix a lot of your troubles.

Have you purchased or sold any links? Since you appear in the supplemental index, it would appear that you received some kind of penalty?

No, I haven't . . .

When did your site first launch? When did you add vBSEO?

Site launched in mid-september, vbseo not long after (less than 2 weeks) but at first it was a membership site with very little visible to the public/bots. For maybe 3 or 4 weeks it has been all free/visible. got the sitemap working, now have around 750 of 1500 urls indexed, but they're all supplemental except 1 or 2.

Has your forum been offline for any length of time, or did you have more than 1 URL set up to access the site?

Nope

I would like to see a "tag line" in your logo that instantly defines what "Mystery Tutor Vault means for first time visitors.

Good idea

I would like to see you add a "Forum" tab at the top in the gray navigation tabs.

Also good

I like that you are trying to reel people in with your video, but it takes up too much space at the top. Normally, I might suggested converting this to an image. This is not possible in your case due to the media content and prohibitive size.

Why not try reducing the video in size and moving it up right into your header space, so that everyone visiting your site can still see the video, but it will be in the header instead and all the repeated text will be removed.

This is intriguing . . . does header space mean the banner itself?

Your site name is repeating on each sub-forum and thread page. You should remove that.

What do you mean . . . repeating where? and how do I remove it?

You should use our replace showpost with Permalink option on thread pages.

Is that on the vbseo cp?

Since vBA is not giving you any significant benefits and may be creating issues, you should consider removing it. You can find another way to focus attention on the "Official SAT Study Guide".

I've been thinking about that . . . what kind of options would I have then to add "blocks" or "modules" around the forum? also, would I have to reinstall vbulletin in my root folder instead of in /forums?

I do not like the top 10 stats when made available for guests and search engines as well.

good point

Doing an extensive review of your site, by checking each item in these resources:

Your Site Review - Stuff to Do First

Briansol's Ultimate Guide to vBSEO

will do, thanks!

1) rename your 'test' forums. 'test' to google is probably showing up as a test page, not an SAT practice test page. try 'practice exam' instead.

wow, that's a really good point . . . will that create any problem since it will look like i have duplicate content once the url gets rewritten but points to the same page? how long in general does it take for google to realize if you rename a forum and change the url . . . is this a big problem?

2) remove vbadvanced if all your going to use it for is a re-peat of the forums. that video/welcome header is absurd. It's nearly my entire viewport-- and i have a 30" monitor.

I've been thinking about getting rid of it . . . I never really wanted the homepage, but i did want the ability to add blocks/modules . . . is there another way to do that? would i have to reinstall vbulletin in the root instead of /forums, and what kind of google problems might that kind of restructuring create?

3) verify your license here with the staff. you aren't showing as a customer.

thanks for pointing that out, i think i took care of it

4) install my settings file from my guide.

do you mean the vbseo ones? i actually already did that, thanks for all your help

Those will fix a lot of your troubles.

Thanks so much for the quick responses, this is helping a lot. I think my biggest immediate issues are resolving the welcome video thing and getting away from vbadvanced while still being able to add blocks/ modules. Any further input would really be appreciated!

[How To] Remove Forum Title from Thread Pages for Long Tail Optimization / Increased Thread Title Relevancy

Here is a mock up of moving the video into the header. Since your video has PowerPoint notes embedded, you probably need to run it the original size. Therefore, you can just setup a new page for the video and link to it within the header.

I don't know if you would be interested in taking your logo concept further, but I added a sample of someone dressed in a bunny suit inside the video, like a PIP (Picture in Picture) video spokesperson. I think it would be funny. Maybe I had too much coffee today.




By the way, I love that you are using video media to promote your site. After checking it out, here are some tips for improving it that I could suggest:

• You might want to break it up into separate videos for each section that you address.
• You should try to pace it a bit faster, and perhaps scale back the dialog a bit.
• For the PowerPoint parts, you might want to use one of the template themes that are available to make it a little more visually interesting.

Great work though. When I first arrived at your site I thought your logo was a bit strange (which is good as it captures attention). The video helps explain things in better detail. If you can speed up the flow a little, I think it's great.

wow, that's a great banner . . . yeah, I think i will definitely take your advice on that, and also on picking up the pace on the video.

In the meantime, though, do you guys have any advice on how utilize blocks/modules without bothering with a homepage? also, what kind of problems can be created by renaming forums, as far as having two urls point to the same content (from google's perspective, at least for a little while). in other words, how long does it take google to learn you changed the forum name, and are there penalties?

also, if i remove vbadvanced, do i have to reinstall vbulletin in the root instead of /forums, and if so what impact will that restructuring have on the way google sees my site?

Can anybody help me out with these questions? I'd like to get started improving my site but I have a couple of things I'd like to clear up first . . .

What kind of problems do you run in to when you rename a forum as far as the URL re-writes goes? Does it look like duplicate content? Do old links get redirected? How long before Google 'realizes' what happened?

Also, and probably more importantly: I'd like to get rid of vbAdvanced. What are the implications of moving my whole forum from mydomain.com/forums to mydomain.com? Also, can anyone recommend an alternative to vbAdvanced that will allow me to have a customizable side column where I can add html? You can probably tell I'm no expert, so if it's possible to avoid complicated template edits, that would be awesome . . .

Any input would be great, I'd really like to get moving on this before Thanksgiving . . .

Re: Impact of removing vBA / installing at root / Using blocks/modules (how)

If you move from /forum/ to root, your URLs will change, Google will have to update, and it will take some time. This is NOT the preferred method.

You can keep vBA installed without using it as the homepage. That is, you can still have your forum display page as your homepage. Since you are running at /root/ and have your forum at /forum/ you will need a custom .htaccess directive. Please submit a support ticket for help with this.

Our staff predominantly has used custom template edits or custom plugins to do block style modules without vBA. However, you can still use vBA without it on the homepage, allowing you to get the modules on your forum pages. This is probably the easiest method for a non-technical user who wants to avoid custom plugin programming or template edits.

Moving to the root will have some short term impact. We recommend sticking with your existing format unless you are a brand new forum that has no long term history with Google. Changing your URLs will always cause some disruption time, and you want to avoid that. Ideally, the only time you should ever do this is when you upgrade to vBSEO. But then we say "set it and forget it".

Re: Renaming forums

If you rename your forums, and you use the forum title in your URLs, it will change all of those page URLs. This is not a good idea.

If you have to do it for any reason, then you can add a Custom Redirect to ensure any links containing the old forum part will be directed to the new. All thread formats will typically be automatically redirected, depending on your configuration settings.

You could use our slug feature as well. This allows you to keep the URL part the same, while changing the actual sub-forum title. This is not the best solution to handle a forum title change, especially if the titles are not closely related.

Re: Time for Google to Find a Sub-Forum Name Change

It should find out pretty quickly with the help of our sitemap, and via crawling your forum display page. However, it will take a while to update all of the thread URLs that include the sub-forum name. The sitemap will contain them the first time it gets re-generated.

However, you should avoid this if possible.

Thanks so much for your response, it definitely sheds some light on my situation.

I have one major concern. I've heard/read here and there that search engines don't like sites that automatically redirect when you navigate to the homepage--that it looks suspicious or spammy. Now that I think of it, though, maybe that only applies to sites that redirect to a whole different domain, as opposed to a different directory of the same domain. Does any of this sound familiar, or will it not be a problem? Will google see what is on www.mydomain.com/forums as my homepage, or will it see my homepage as 'blank' with just a redirect? Will any of that hurt me in the SERPs?

Your solution sounds neater and cleaner, I'm just looking to clear up a few questions before I jump into it.

Thanks so much for your help so far.

It's possible to make your forum homepage "appear" to be at root (/) while the rest of your forum exist at /forum/.

You will need to open a support ticket to request assistance with this.

BTW - I would not want to keep a homepage constantly redirecting, even to a sub-forum. The above solution will avoid that.

Awesome! I'm going to go ahead with the .htaccess redirect you described. I really appreciate the time you took to answer my questions and critique my site - this is going to be a big help for me.

I'll let you know how things go.

Great. I plan to hear about your success.