Confused / scared about vBSEO

Hey guys,

I am new to vBulletin, creating my community / blog about a month ago and have seen 270 or so members sign up so far. I have been concious about the SEO of my forum since it's opening, but I have left it til know to help me get those random google hits that everyone loves to receive.

At the moment I have been driving most of the visits to my site and received around 16,000 hits.

I currently have the google / yahoo sitemap generator installed, and it seems to be working, but I think my search ranking in google is terrible. For example, from Google Webmaster Tools:

Property Status Sitemap type Web Format Sitemap Index Submitted May 19, 2009 Last downloaded by Google 16 hours ago Status OK Total URLs in Sitemap 5325 Indexed URLs in Sitemap 29
That seems crazy that 5325 url's are in the sitemap and google has indexed only 29?

I think a lot of the traffic being driven to my site from google is people searching my site name and finding the posts on my front wordpress blog.

Currently the forum has 400 - 450 threads and around 5600 - 6000 posts and I was wondering how easy it will be to install vBSEO and utilise its functions for a site of my size / age.

So far I have seen around 3000 total visits from google in that first month, with around 30 a day in the first few days of may to now around 150 - 200 per day in these first few days of june.

I don't know if that is good / bad for a beginner forum so I would like some feedback on that.

I think the main thing that has attracted me to vBSEO is the amount of forums that are currently using it and reporting good results.

I also want to use the cleaner mod rewrite urls on the forums, instead of the current "forums/showthread.php?t=178" type style.

Is it safe for me to change my urls to the thread title from the numbered style at this point in time ? I think if I do this now it might bring my google search rankings down?

Thanks for your help, I am extremely new / confused about vBSEO and would like to find out a few things before I take the plunge.

Regards.

Hello ,

Yes vBSEO is definately the right path for you. You should not worry about your currently indexed content as vBSEO 301 redirects all old vBulletin url's to new format. Plus vBSEO correctly achieves a Link consensus .

Hi Doc,

Those "random Google hits" are what is going to drive the success of your forum. We refer to them as long tail SEO. Even though you are new to vBulletin, you actually found vBSEO very quickly at just one month into your launch. That's great!

Don't worry about those sitemap stats right now. Before you get vBSEO enabled, many of those 5000+ URLs are going to be wasted resources. There will be duplicate content links, noise URLs, and showpost threads that are IMO not useful to your search success.

I think your traffic numbers are excellent for your first month of operations.

This is the absolute best time for you to install vBSEO. You are showing your capability to rank in Google thus far, and vBSEO can now further optimize and accelerate that growth pattern.

Since you have such a small amount of threads, I would expect them to be crawled in 2-7 days.

When you do the change over, your URLs will be included your sitemap. All the old versions will be 301 redirected to the new versions, allow Google and the other search engines to do a rapid update.

I feel that the rapid progress you have made so far is a strong indication that you have a great chance of building a very successful forum.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Regards,

Joe Ward
Crawlability Inc.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

Hi Doc,

Those "random Google hits" are what is going to drive the success of your forum. We refer to them as long tail SEO. Even though you are new to vBulletin, you actually found vBSEO very quickly at just one month into your launch. That's great!

Don't worry about those sitemap stats right now. Before you get vBSEO enabled, many of those 5000+ URLs are going to be wasted resources. There will be duplicate content links, noise URLs, and showpost threads that are IMO not useful to your search success.

I think your traffic numbers are excellent for your first month of operations.

This is the absolute best time for you to install vBSEO. You are showing your capability to rank in Google thus far, and vBSEO can now further optimize and accelerate that growth pattern.

Since you have such a small amount of threads, I would expect them to be crawled in 2-7 days.

When you do the change over, your URLs will be included your sitemap. All the old versions will be 301 redirected to the new versions, allow Google and the other search engines to do a rapid update.

I feel that the rapid progress you have made so far is a strong indication that you have a great chance of building a very successful forum.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Regards,

Joe Ward
Crawlability Inc.

Thanks for the information Joe. I would also like to ask if vBSEO is good for users who run a wordpress blog on the website index and the forums in the /forums/ directory? Do I need to generate 1 sitemap for the wordpress blog and 1 sitemap for the vbulletin forum?

I tried to use an online site map generator for the wordpress blog and it errored, but when I typed in my url /forums/ it created the sitemap fine.

Also what happens if two different users create extremely similar threads one day or one hour after the next, what would the urls look like? They wouldn't get automatically merged would they? I thought I read that somewhere I mean if two users made the exact same thread title, how would the url look? I don't entirely understand the url structure if two identical threads are made.

Would it be:

http://yoursite.com/forums/2009/06/i...-buying-vbseo/

http://yoursite.com/forums/2009/06/i...-buying-vbseo/

How does it differentiate the two identical threads?

And also what is the best structure for your urls?

Thanks for your help it's greatly appreciated.

Actually that was another question I had, I currently have an adsense banner in the header / footer on my forum, do I have to change those when I install vBSEO?

I also have my Google Analytics code in my footer, do I just remove that code before installing vBSEO and just paste my code into vBSEO instead? That won't mess up my analytics will it?

Sorry for the newbie questions, just trying to clarify everthing

No - you keep your AdSense and Analytics codes in the same place. No changes required.

However, since you already have Analytics setup, please do *not* add it to your vBSEO Control Panel.

Great question.

I would suggest removing it from your footer template and using vbseo's built in feature. It offers more tracking and user segmentation than the simply copy/paste google provides. Plus, it saves a template revert on vB upgrades if you don't have anything else custom in the footer.

All threads are required to have the ID in them, regardless of the rewrite format. Thus, there will never be a duplicate thread.

Do it up. you won't regret it. Google alone provides over 85% of my daily 13k unique's.