Total Noob

Hello,

I started my first website just over a month ago. Welcome To FiskerTalk.com! A Fisker Forum and Community I just installed vbSEO a few days ago. Prior to that, I had the vbSEO sitemap mod and it worked fine. Now the sitemap generator isn't working and I've no idea why.

There are at least two competitor forums up and running, both have been running longer than mine by about a month. Neither is using vbulletin or vbSEO. It's pretty apparent that I'm attracting more visitors as now I'm getting a new member almost everyday and a few of them have even started posting. Neither of the other places are getting new members. For Google I'm dominating them in the search results. I got a late start with Yahoo and am one position behind one of them. Incidentally since Yahoo did start indexing me I'm getting much more traffic from them.

Any tips would be appreciated, however I must warn you I've never done any programming or anything of the like so my technical knowledge is limited. I've been educating myself on the fly and it's been a fun learning process. Thanks.

Hello,

I see your sitemap is working fine : http://www.fiskertalk.com/forum/sitemap_index.xml.gz

Design :
I'm never like the default vBulletin style, I'm recommended to try the FREE vBSEO style 1 or 2


vBSEO :

• Please try to replace your showposts with permlinks : [How To] Replace Showpost Links with Permalinks - Max Out Search Engine Crawling Efficiency
• Please try to use vBSEO RR : [How to] Setup Relevant Replacements with vBSEO
• Please try to remove your forum title from your threads title : [How To] Remove Forum Title from Thread Pages for Long Tail Optimization / Increased Thread Title Relevancy
• I want you to remove include every thing in your sitemap (Albums,Members Profiles Pages,Showposts .....etc) and only include thread pages and forum display only From vBSEO Sitemap Generator
• Are you Installed vBSEO Sig ?

SEO :

• I'm recommended to remove FAQ,Calender for guests only
• Just remove your site URL from your forum keywords
• I'm recommended to increase your forum description
• 301 Redirect non-www to www : search engines may think your site with www is different than your site without www
• Add your site in DMOZ Directory
• Add your site in Yahoo Directory (The free one is enough )

Hi Marco, thanks for the reply.

This stuff will take me a while to implement. However, in the permalink thread you posted here I noticed it says: "Verify if your showpost pages are getting significant traffic before proceeding (Google Analytics)."

I wouldn't say any of my pages are getting significant traffic . What does this mean and is it important to me?

Marco:

I changed most of the things you pointed out. My only questions:
"Are you Installed vBSEO Sig ?" - what does this mean?

"I'm recommended to remove FAQ,Calender for guests only
Just remove your site URL from your forum keywords" - How do I do this... I searched and couldn't find anything.
Thanks

He's referring to our vBSEO Conditional Signatures product. It's available free in the downloads area (bottom of the list). This product gives you options to hide signatures (and thus, their outgoing links) from guests/bots/members/etc how you configure it.

Regarding showpost, i would disable it right now along with the archive. No point in indexing either, and now is the perfect time to do it before the bots waste any time on those areas.

We have how-to's for both of those:
[How To] Completely Turn Off the vBulletin Archive
[How To] Replace Showpost Links with Permalinks - Max Out Search Engine Crawling Efficiency

removing Faq and calendar links for guests is farily simple.

Edit templates - navbar template

find:

Code:

<td class="vbmenu_control"><a href="calendar.php$session[sessionurl_q]">$vbphrase[calendar]</a></td>

replace with:

Code:

<if condition="$show['member']"><td class="vbmenu_control"><a href="calendar.php$session[sessionurl_q]">$vbphrase[calendar]</a></td></if>

and

find:

Code:

<td class="vbmenu_control"><a href="faq.php$session[sessionurl_q]" accesskey="5">$vbphrase[faq]</a></td>

and replace with:

Code:

<if condition="$show['member']"><td class="vbmenu_control"><a href="faq.php$session[sessionurl_q]" accesskey="5">$vbphrase[faq]</a></td></if>

After that, the main thing you need to do is POST POST POST! The more content you have, the more traffic will likely get due to having more search terms available as a landing page.