Few General Questions

Before I buy it, I would like to ask you some questions:

1. Which feature of vBSeo do you consider to be the best?
2. According to your plan, will you implement another equally important feature by 2009?
3. What is the biggest disadvantage of vBSeo?
4. What are your plans for the blogs?
5. Do you believe that a non-english forum can benefit the same from vBSeo?
6. Do most of your new clients have a big or small sized forum?
7. In a scale of 10, what grade do you think your support would get?
8. If I have vBSeo, should I have the vBSEO sitemap hack that you have released in vB.org, or its built-in?
9. Why vBSEO sitemap doesn't support pings to Live or Msn?
10. Is vBSEO as good for Live as it is for Google?
11. Is it possible for the URL of a category to be in the format "www.vbseo.com/forumname"?
12. Is it possible for the URL of a thread to have the format "www.vbseo.com/forumname/threadtitle"?
13. Is it possible to give to a particular thread a url that doesn't have the format of the other threads? For instance, the thread with title "Why vbseo?" to have the url "www.vbseo.com/why_vbseo" whereas the other threads have the format described in q.12?
14. I have extremely modified templates in my forum. Will this be a problem for vBSEO?
15. Will the old URLs work?
16. What will happen to the urls if I uninstall? I'll have a bunch of urls posted by the members, that will not work. This is a serious reason why I'm reluctant to install it, so is there a way to avoid this?

my answers as a customer:

1) all of it. it's not one feature that makes it great... it's all of them working together to acheive one end result.
2) as a customer, this isn't for me to answer
3) none
4) blogs have re-write function already
5) sure! there's utf-8 support built in, as well as non-english rewrite chars to english chars, etc...
6) i have one big (1 mil post) and 3 small on vbseo
7) 10. vbseo support rocks. hell, they fix stuff that's not even vbseo half the time.
8) it's an add-on just like on .org and should be run
9) there's a new version coming out shortly of the sitemap. perhaps it will include it. Otherwise, perhaps live doesn't have a ping function? i don't know.
10) it is not search-engine specific.
11) yes
12) no you can't... simply because theres a good chance you will have more than 1 thread with the exact same title, and thus the Id of the thread is required.
13) vbseo has forum slugs, but not thread slugs
14) vbseo doesn't have any template edits. Where they do a general replace, there is the option to put in a html comment, like <!-- vbseo_linkback --> in the place
15) yes, they are 301'd to the new links
16) you can convert back with htacces rules

Any more replies?

1. Our URL Rewriting is important to achieve link consensus, and boost the long tail SEO effect. However, Brian is right in stating that vBSEO overall provides an abundance of SEO features that will be helpful to you.

• Pin the Tail on the SEO Donkey (with Link Consensus)!
• What is the Search Long Tail? - vBulletin SEO Forums

2. We are constantly seeking opportunities to improve vBSEO. Some new features are already slated for development, and we are working on some important new concepts that will arrive in the next vBSEO version, either late 2008, or early 2009.

3. The biggest disadvantage of vBSEO is installing in, and then causing you to falsely believing that it can give you a #1 position for any keyword you choose, or to believe that your job is done. You still need to continue adding great content, marketing your community, and building linkbacks to your site, etc.

4. vBSEO 3.2 (currently in RC7, prior to release) will include native support for vBBlogs.

5. Any forum, English or not, can benefit from vBSEO. Remember that achieving link consensus has nothing to do with the "keywords in the URLs". Link consensus is about "1 URL PER RESOURCE". Likewise, many of the other SEO features included in vBSEo are not language specific.

6. Our clients range from brand new forums with 0 posts/0 members to a forum that has achieved the status of the most highly trafficked vBulletin powered forum on the Internet.

7. I believe many of our customers would give us a 10. However, we would grade ourself perhaps a 7/10. The reason is that, we are constantly seeking ways to improve. Some of these things we strive to do are:

• Boost our response times
• Increase the # of languages we support
• Improve our sales & support processes, to make them more integrated and more user friendly

8. The vBSEO sitemap is separate and not built in. Therefore, yes, you must install it separately and you should definitely install it with vBSEO.

9. vBSEO Sitemap DOES support pings to Yahoo! and MSN.

10. Each search engine has different evaluation criteria. Google seems to be more in favor of including large amounts of content from a particular forum, while Yahoo and MSN seem to trail behind in most cases that we have evaluated. HOWEVER, good search engine practices continue to be good search engine practices. So, while the others may not increase as dramatically as Google, it's still important to SEO your forum with vBSEO.

11. You can have a forum URL without an ID; however, having the ID has advantages. If you ever make any changes, the ID will help redirect the content automatically. It also can help to reduce performance overhead by reducing queries to the database.

12. See #11. Same with thread URLs.

13. You might be able to rewrite a particular thread by using our "Custom Rewrite Rules". I would not advise doing this on a large scale, but for a few different threads it could be acceptable.

14. vBSEO does not require any specific template edits. We are designed non-intrusively. So you should have no problems regardless of whether you are using the default template, or a highly modified template. There are some optional elements like our Relevant Replacements that would require you to make some template edits. However, these are also versatile enough to handle many different types of elaborately designed templates.

15. The old URLs will be automatically 301 redirected to the new content. This is the search engines preferred method of being informed the location of content that has moved.

16. In the rare case that you do decide to un-install, you can setup .htaccess redirects to forward your new URL formats, back to the old format. Note: This is one case in which you would want to definitely use IDs in your forum and thread URLs, otherwise, this would not be possible, without custom work. Firstly, you should not be planning on removing vBSEO. However, if you think this could happen for *any reason*, then you should use the IDs in your URL formats.

Is htere any disadvantage if you have had xxxx.com/vbulletin

to change it to

xxxx.com/forum

when you are at it and start using VBSEO?

Most users who have /vbulletin/ in their URL have done so when installing it for the first time, and did not think about the SEO impact.

For those who have their site setup like this for a long time, and get traffic, I usually just recommend that it stay the same.

However, if you are installing vBSEO and are going to do a complete update to your URLs, this is the best time to do a change to the sub-directory vBulletin is located within.

Personally - if I were in your situation, I would consider getting rid of /vbulletin/. You can either replace it with /forum/ or just run your entire forum right from the root of your domain.

But I have 3-400 000 uniques per month...

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

Most users who have /vbulletin/ in their URL have done so when installing it for the first time, and did not think about the SEO impact.

For those who have their site setup like this for a long time, and get traffic, I usually just recommend that it stay the same.

However, if you are installing vBSEO and are going to do a complete update to your URLs, this is the best time to do a change to the sub-directory vBulletin is located within.

Personally - if I were in your situation, I would consider getting rid of /vbulletin/. You can either replace it with /forum/ or just run your entire forum right from the root of your domain.

The URLs are going to change, so replacing /vbulletin/ is not going to provide a big impact.

During the update, the SEs will start purging some of the duplicate content and noise content they have indexed during that time.

With such a massive update, especially when you are using our sitemap, the search engines will be very interested in your forum, as they notice that all of the URLs have been updated.

If you are getting that many uniques, then you also already have good search engine credibility, which means that you should expect the re-indexing process to be accelerated.

WHat is a sitemap?

So nothing really should go wrong and now is hte bets time to do it I beleive (lower traffic = summer).

Our sitemap is a separate plugin, available in our downloads area, that basically sends a list of all of your forum pages to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

If you don't have it installed yet, then you should wait until after you've added vBSEO.

I suppose that an off-peak season is a good time to do your testing. Remember that vBSEO is meant to be a long term solution. If you think you might install and then get cold feet after a couple weeks, it's best not to install at all. If you install and keep it installed long term, then you will see the positive effects.

I am talking the traffic back withing 2-3 months, right?

Loosing my valuable traffic for 6 monrths and MAYBE get it back is not an option.

Originally Posted by Hmmm

I am talking the traffic back withing 2-3 months, right?

Loosing my valuable traffic for 6 monrths and MAYBE get it back is not an option.

We do not anticipate a loss of traffic. We do expect changes in your indexed page count as old pages are dropped, and replaced by new versions.

However, there is some variance in the effects. Briansol I believe has stated before that he did experience a slight drop in traffic immediately after installing for a short period, before it exploded.

Got it.

So would this change affect it negatively do you think?

"Is htere any disadvantage if you have had xxxx.com/vbulletin

to change it to

xxxx.com/forum "