Vbulletin 4.1.4 forum critique

[croportal]

so we finally have upgraded to forum 4.1.4

your critique

Croportal Forum

[A.Chakery]

Hello,

You have done great seo work on your forum, Here is my suggestions about your website :

• Try to disable vBulletin Archive : [How To] Completely Turn Off the vBulletin Archive [* Note: before disabling the vb archive , check Your Google Analytics to see how much traffic are coming to your website through vb archive , if it was too much, only disable the vBseo Archive Footer links and 301 redirect the Archive links. (most of the times the incoming traffic from archive is not that much and its better to disable the archive) ]
• Try to validate all of your forum pages : [Invalid] Markup Validation of http://www.croportal.net/forum/ - W3C Markup Validator
• Try to use a CDN service , I suggest you to use MaxCDN.com
• Try to remove FAQ and Calendar links (and all other URLs which are not important for Search Engine bots)
• Try to include only Showthread / forumdisplay / blog pages into vBSEO sitemap

Good luck.
Ali.Ch.

[croportal]

thanks Chakery for critiqe and sorry for late response i was on vacation

FAQ and calendar are disabled by robots.txt

i am gonna remove vbulletin archive and install vbseo sitemap

also i didnt enable cannonical url, so probably i will do this later...

my visits after upgrading to 4.1.4 has increase

[A.Chakery]

My pleasure,

Also try to speedup your forum using a CDN service, you can also test your website's performance here
www.webpagetest.org

Regards,
Ali.

[croportal]

do u have any other tips to speed up my site, because i have lod 15-20 and then site goes off.

now i have other problem - i just upgraded to 4.1.5 and live site is not working because of problems: admincp not working - problem with vbseo htaccess - upgrade from 4.1.4 to 4.1.5.

[A.Chakery]

To be honest I haven't used vBulletin 4 on my live forums yet, and I suggest you to open a Support ticket to get a faster respond.

Maybe you was using a custom admincp name before the upgrade (I mean you had renamed the admincp) and before the upgrade process you forgot to rename it ?

----------
About speeding up the site :
there is so many optimizations that should be done, like decreasing the images sizes, using CSS Sprites for small images, Combining CSS and Js files which is one of the most important one, and I think there is a related plugin for this issue,(but always try to test such plugins on your test forum before using them on your main website).

Please inform me when you re-opened your forum I will try to review your forum and give you more instructions.


Regards,
Ali.

[croportal]

Thanks Ali,


i didnt rename it. problem is with htaccess, i have send support and almost 3 hours i didnt any respond, and my forum is down. nice

i will let you know when everything gonna be okay

[croportal]

Its working again so you can take a look

[IcEWoLF]

Hello croportal, I'd suggest giving cloudflare a try, it truly does work and it can help everyone world wide load your website faster no matter where they are located. The best part of is its Free!
You can find out more about cloudflare here @ www.cloudflare.com
I believe by adding CloudFlare + MaxCDN and vbOptimise will improve your forums load time greatly and your users will thank you!
Also since you use a large forum I'd strongly suggest checking out Sphinx Search for vBulletin 4
Its very good for large boards.
A good tool to use to check out your forum load speed is tools.pingdom.com
I've ran your site "http://www.croportal.net/forum/" and everything loaded within 4.8 seconds, its very good!

[croportal]

is there any link how to optimize vb4, i have see it somewhere but i cannot find it now.

i was thinking to pu Sphinx, allot of people says that is very good.

thanks guys


only thing that i am affraid is to allow canonical urls.


and what you say to put some forums under robots.txt

i have forum - introduce yourself, and every thread that user start is the same, example: greetings, greetings i am new here, and threads like that, with no special content?

[IcEWoLF]

is there any link how to optimize vb4, i have see it somewhere but i cannot find it now.

i was thinking to pu Sphinx, allot of people says that is very good.

thanks guys


only thing that i am affraid is to allow canonical urls.


and what you say to put some forums under robots.txt

i have forum - introduce yourself, and every thread that user start is the same, example: greetings, greetings i am new here, and threads like that, with no special content?

Check this thread: Articles - vBulletin 4 Optimization

Also check out vB Optimise http://www.dragonbyte-tech.com/vbeco...t=product&id=1
A chart on how much VBOptimise helped other large boards: http://www.dragonbyte-tech.com/vboptimisesites.php

Before you look into the vB Optimise try the first link I posed from digitalpoint, see if that helps, if it doesn't you might want to check out vBOptimise.

[A.Chakery]

First let me thank ICEWOLF for the great suggestions,

I reviewed your forum,

Here is my suggestions :

1.Try to remove the Footer links and completely disable the vBulletin Archive.
2.Try to remove the background image and all other unnecessary images.
3.I noticed that there a facebook fanbox on everypage of yourforum, try to remove all of them and add a link of your facebook fan page instead, cause facebook fanboxes comes with lofts of image files and javascripts so they will increase the pageload of your forum so much.
4.Try to use MaxCDN and Cloadflare , Personally I am using the combination of these two and I have had a great results so far.
5.Try to remove this widget : "Oblak tagova" cause those are linking to unnecessary pages of your forum.
6.Please take a look at here : WebPagetest Test Result - Dulles : www.croportal.net/forum/ - 08/25/11 23:25:11 , to be honest its not a good results ,
my page load with bunch of images on my forum is about 2.5-3Sec (which I am not so satisfied of it). Its so so important for SEO.
7.Try to validate all of your style pages : [Invalid] Markup Validation of http://www.croportal.net/forum/ - W3C Markup Validator


Ok , All of above suggestions is based on two parameters :
1.Decreasing the Page load time
2.Driving traffic to the important pages of your forum (basically Forums and Threads)


Regards,
Ali.Ch.

[croportal]

So i have make changes like you guys told me to do


1. i have remove footer links and completely disable the vbulletin archive
2. i didnt do that because we gonna sell the background images soon
3. i gonna add at header facebook like button and remove all other fanbox
4. thinking to use this but i need at least 2 tb bandwith and 1 terabyte of space and there is only a option to buy 5tb of bandwith and users are from croatia? is that a problem?
5. i have remove that widget where are tags
7. i have installed vbseo sitemap (and enable only showthread and forumdisplay pages)
8. i have installed vboptimise
9. i have enable canonical urls in vbseo (but i am not sure what they do?)
10. still need to validate style pages


but for now i think that i have done really great work, now wait and see what is gonna happend


P.S. i have intention to put sphinx on my forum

[IcEWoLF]

Lots of improvements for the forums.
I'd suggest using clouflare, it's free. www.cloudflare.com
It will save you bandwidth.
Currently MaxCDN has a promotion if you buy 5TB bandwidth:

5 Terabytes for $350
originally $495 savings of $145

7 Terabytes for $380
originally $693 savings of $313

20 Terabytes for $980
originally $1980 savings of $1000 (Valid 24 Months)

100 Terabytes for $4480
originally $9999 savings of $5419 (Valid 24 Months)

Email MaxCDN about the promotion and they will save you some money.
It will help out a lot more.
When the website loads fast, it will make your users happy and new visitors too.

[croportal]

can u quick me explain what cloudfare exactly does?