Old forum with numerous mods

[Marc Smith]

I have an old forum going back to 1997 (vBulletin since 2001) - Elsmar.com. I have a lot of template and phrase mods. Running the latest 3.6.

Seeking discussion of template and phrase modifications (particularly template modifications) on vbseo working correctly. Is there a list of templates vbseo 'needs' to be 'standard'?

Bottom line is I'm not worried about the cost of thevbseo software. I'm more worried about the effects on my modded forum.

[rmjvol]

Hi Marc,

I'm somewaht newbie to the forum world. Dabbled with a few phpbb's in 2003 & started my current vBulletin project in February. So you're way more experienced in forums & vBulletin than I am.

And I'm not any good at doing the mods. So I can't really comment on how your heavily mod'd board will fit with vbseo. Somebody will come along with a decent answer for that.

I noticed one of your other posts complained that there were many examples here of # of indexed pages but few examples of traffic. I agree.

While my forum's not typical, my progress thread does discuss traffic & referrals. It's a new board & sounds like you know that new & old sites are treated differently these days. If I was in your shoes, I know if would be difficult to make wholesale changes if every thing is at least ok with Google.

I've got a 6 year old static site with about 100 pages. It's been golden in all 3 SE's from the beginning and generates about $5-10k/yr with almost zero upkeep. I know there are some changes that *should* make it perform 20-100% better but the chance of pissing off Google makes me hesitant to try it. I'm betting your decision has a similar component.

All I can tell you is this mod is as complete as anything available and it would cost probably $x,000 - $xx,000 to do all the work from scratch at the rates of:

• an experienced, talented seo
• an experienced, talented vBulletin admin
• an experienced, talented programmer

I've been making a living from seo & aff marketing for several years so I know good work when I see it. I can tell you that vbseo is as good as is available. It's comprehensive as opposed to pieced together. Plus they have excellent support and impressive ongoing development.

Only you know what your current traffic is and what the realistic potential is. If there's a marginal upside, I'd probably not risk the swap if I were you. If there's a big upside potential, I'd be more likely to take the risk of implementing vbseo.

If you decide to make the jump, I suggest spending an extra $500 to get t2dman to help with the implementation and the tweaking. I paid him to help me and it was money well spent.

Good luck, Ross

[Marc Smith]

I don't have an income issue. I'll make over US$60K this year easily off of Elsmar. My site is relatively small, but the niche is good. Number of visitors and page views fluxuates over the year, month to month, as it always has, but generally the trend is up over multiple years.

I'm still in a question mode of the importance of 'name of the file' in rankings, but it appears to be more significant than is was in the past. Google crawls fairly often and Yahoo practically lives there so I figure it would take 4 to 6 months for any real impact to show up.

As to the install, I'm sure it would be worth the money because, having looked at all the 'options', it's way too complex for me to want to try to figure out vbseo in a short time.

As I said, in part right now I'm concerned with integration into a modded forum more than anything (as well as ease of uninstalling were that to become necessary for whatever reason). I haven't thought too much about pissing Google off with 301 redirects for thousands of pages. I know that any changes I make will take 6 months or more to stabilize.

So - I was searching for some stuff earlier and though about vbseo again. Thus my question today. For example, my main forum page has the 'stuff happening' on top, rather than at the bottom. How dependent is vbseo on template hooks... I'm not convinced I want to revert all templates, for example, so that vbseo will work.

[Juan Muriente]

Hello Marc,

I'm still in a question mode of the importance of 'name of the file' in rankings, but it appears to be more significant than is was in the past.

I'd say the biggest value of vBSEO is that it consolidates multiple URLs for the same content into a unique URL. Keywords in the URLs are IMO and added value, but certainly not the biggest factor. In fact, some users set vBSEO to use non-keyword format with excellent results.

As I said, in part right now I'm concerned with integration into a modded forum more than anything (as well as ease of uninstalling were that to become necessary for whatever reason).

... So - I was searching for some stuff earlier and though about vbseo again. Thus my question today. For example, my main forum page has the 'stuff happening' on top, rather than at the bottom. How dependent is vbseo on template hooks... I'm not convinced I want to revert all templates, for example, so that vbseo will work.

vBSEO is 99% independent of your template layout as it is completely non-intrusive, the software modifies output on the fly. Only those elements that add html to your front-end (like the ping/track/refback functionality) could be affected by your template changes, but this is very rare.

Of course, if for any reason you are unable to use vBSEO, Crawlability will NOT keep your money. So feel free to experiment, it's a 5 min install even on heavily-modded forums

[libertylounge]

We have a ton of mods running on our forum, and vbSEO install was seamless aside from the initial issue of newer ionCube loaders.

It didn't impact our mods in any way, including things like RSS feeds, etc..