For hi ranked site where vB is secondary to main url?

I have a highly ranked site (2 or 3 on the primary key word, 1 or 2 on pay per clicks that take people to e-commerce landing pages). But my active 5-yr-old, 13,000-member vB site doesn't seem to be indexed much by search engines.

1. How would vBSEO affect the top rankings of my Shopsite.com e-commerce product, which has been highly ranked for years. We have dozens of incoming, outgoing links (free and paid, home page and internal landing pages). We get some 40,000 unique visitors/month. We are initiating affiliate deals with clubs that will make money selling our stuff. So we'll get more incoming links.

2. Would vbSEO rankings for my vBulletin compete with my main site rankings? Main site is www.mainsite.com. Board is www.mainsite.com/vbulletin. My home page template/skin is replicated around my vBulletin home page and forums. I have 50 forums/subforums.

While I have lots of custom templates, no hacks, yet. Considering prophoto, classified, review products. Hosted on own managed private 70 gb server. Unix. vB 3.6.

Recommendations, strategy, warnings, questions?

tia

Donald,

1 - vBSEO would significantly improve the SEO of the vBulletin portion of the site. However, it could also have a side effect of improving your main site SEO as well since links posted within your forum to your main site will pass PageRank more effectively. In addition to passing some link authority, it may also boost the crawling priority for your main site. However, in your case, it sounds like you are already doing very well with the main site.

2. It's certainly *possible* that your forum could start to outrank your main site, but I don't think that is exactly what will happen. vBSEO's optimizations are likely to start generating you traffic from a variety of different keyword searches on a thread-by-thread basis, not necessary for your top 1 or 2 desired keywords. However, these more specific searches (all in all) will probably result in better conversions over time. What you need to do is prepare your forum for these visitors. Make sure that the navigation structure is set-up to make it obvious for your inbound visitors as to how to get to your main site where your conversions occur.