some new questions

Hello everyone, I've been lurking here, reading and getting my interest up in your product. I just bought something simular from another company that I'm not too thrilled about.

So I have a few questions about this, as I am kind of confused because part of your forums are locked out to members who havent bought the product yet, I'm not sure if thats a good or a bad thing yet.

The product looks promising and you seem to have great credentials too.

1. Assuming I take the plunge and bought it, what kind of support is available? Is there enough to get me through the installation process successfully?

2. It appears from what I've read here, a sitemap is most helpful, does your product make one, or should I make my own?

3. This product seems to be something that the purchaser is constantly working on, not just installed and forgot?

I look forward to your feedback.

1. They have an installation service plus there are many third party installers.

2.They have a free sitemap mod that you can install whether you buy vBSEO or not. It's available at vBulletin.org Forum.

3. It is constantly updated.

Does that mean that it is too hard for the purchaser (me) to install it?

If you can follow instructions and are familiar with ftp and url settings then no, it's not too hard at all.

You should make all your url choices before you do that though. You don't want the search engines to collect some urls and then you change your mind on how you want them structured.

See, this is the kind of information that is helpful to me, thank you!
I am no expert, but I am comfortable with FTP, and am fairly clear on url's, but you lost me with the statement about making url choices in advance.

Probably because I've yet to install, and as such dont fully understand what it actually involved. So I dont understand the making of url choices, or changing them later. I am just lost and dont know what you are referring to here.

It seems you are saying I need to layout a structure for my forum, as interpeted by the search engines, or how the pages are indexed?

Maybe, is it possible to read the complete directions prior to buying?
This way, I may be able to hold a knowledgeable conversation?
(just thinking outloud)

Check out:
vBSEO 3.1.0 Readme File

Joe, Thank you for pointing me in the right direction, the install seems pretty straight forward indeed.

What about after the install, what steps come next?

Well - the default options may very well be all you need.

My biggest recommendation is to review your URL Rewriting options and choose one that you will stick with forever. You do not want to change these once it is set.

Beyond that, you can start explore the other features in the control panel, and ask questions here to help you make decisions regarding confirmation, or just to understand how a particular feature works in more detail.

After you have everything set-up the way you want, you should install our sitemap (if you don't have it already of course).

I seem to remember reading somethign about the sitemap writing the site backwards?

Or rather that the search engines were indexing them backwards, is that an issue I need be concerned with?

greenpassion url structure is a matter of taste for each webmaster and each website. You can have forum titles and thread titles in your url, but then they may be quite long. You can have forums as /f##/ and use the thread title as well. I use the latter with the thread id at the end. The idea behind the thread id after the thread title is that if you ever want to change back or do something else, you will have the thread id in all the the links out there on the web. Then you can redirect to whatever your new link is using that thread id.

Originally Posted by greenpassion

I seem to remember reading somethign about the sitemap writing the site backwards?

Or rather that the search engines were indexing them backwards, is that an issue I need be concerned with?

No, there is an option to reverse it now.

I remember reading a thread about relevant URL's and how VBSEO fixes that problem.

I have about 1000 pages of html, all linked to, from a main page, using relevant URL's will vbseo fix that for me?

bump

I remember reading a thread about relevant URL's and how VBSEO fixes that problem.

I have about 1000 pages of html, all linked to, from a main page, using relevant URL's will vbseo fix that for me?

vBSEO will only process pages that are served through the vBulletin Engine, so if they are just plain stand-alone HTML files, vBSEO won't do anything to those.