It's been said before, I'll say it again

Hello 007, welcome to the boards =)

First of all, GREAT work. I have seen what this does for other sites, and am impressed by success stories of other forum owners.

Thank-you, I'm extremely happy with the results people are getting. We've created a monster!

Now, here's my situation. I have 3 vBulletin licenses, and plan to acquire 2 more by the end of the year.

If I get this, I would want it for all of my forums. That would be $750 pretty quickly, just $50 short of the $800 it cost me to license 5 forums...

My suggestion to you is to create an option for people who want to use this on up to 5 forums.

At present, we have not yet *formally* created a multi-license pack, however, I'll be happy to give you a bulk discount. Please PM me for the specifics when you are ready to purchase.

My second concern is the copyright policy. To be Frank, unless the copyright can be completely removed, I am not interested in this product. Think of it like this:

In situation A: I don't use VBSEO, and VBSEO does not get any extra recognition or traffic from my sites. VBSEO also does not make any money from me, because I do not use VBSEO.

Now, situation B: I use VBSEO, but VBSEO does not get any extra recognition or traffic from my sites, because I have paid extra to have the copyright removed. VBSEO sells upwards of $750 in product that it has long since paid for development costs, plus any extra for the brand-free option. That's a lot of money to leave on the table when most of it is profit.

A few people have expressed their concerns that displaying vBSEO's copyright would allow their competitors to follow suit by installing vBSEO as well.

I'll take this opportunity to post some thoughts regarding this:

vBSEO being used by competing sites will not render it ineffective. This is equivalent to saying that all blogs powered by Wordpress will eventually fail because the software provides good out-of-the-box SEO characteristics. Forums running vBSEO will be better positioned to harness SEO traffic.

SEO for any site is directly related to content. For forums, specifically, it is a thread-per-thread thing. Each thread, no matter for which site, has the opportunity to rank higher with vBSEO or other SEO efforts in general. To have your competitor rank higher for specific threads, a competitor would basically need to *craft* threads, thread titles and content within these. The nature of free speech (individuality) of people posting in forums makes this virtually impossible.

A branding-free version desirable? Several of our customers have been requesting this option. While it is not available at present, please rest assured we will make it available sometime in the near future.

Last of all, you said it yourself, this has been an overwhelming success. You should seriously consider selling your code to vBulletin to include in all licenses, because think about what's bound to happen if you don't:

I'm sure vBulletin is aware of this mod. It is being talked about on vBulletin.org as well as the official site. The desire for it is clear, as are its results. Due to "popular demand," vBulletin will most likely create a seamlessly integrated system to do the same thing. Once this happens, VBSEO has instantly become a memory. It's obviously top of the line software. You really should pitch it to vBulletin. I don't see why they wouldn't at the very least entertain your proposal, because it would help them tremendously against THEIR competition.

I appreciate your suggestion. For the time being we are heavily focused on ensuring that our launch is successful, improving our checkout mechanisms, launching our affiliate program, and improving our customer support response times, etc. We will consider all options as long as we determine that they are the best for our customers and for Crawlability.

Juan