Some questions as we consider purchasing:

1. Looking at your marketing pages, there was mention of something about intercepting outbound links (links posted in sigs, etc). The reference was for something called "private" forums. Can you clarify this? Would this apply to "public" forums? And, specifically, does vbSEO provide a tool to "capture and redirect" outbound links instead of having the posts just be direct links?

2. We are re-vamping our site and have a pre-production server setup with something like "dev.ournewsite.com" but the final version will be "www.ournewsite.com". Will your licensing scheme allow us to deploy in both the "dev" and production environments?

3. And finally, we purchased vBulletin and the branding removal upgrade. We would like the same with your tool. We are very adamant about continuing the building of our OWN brand and not advertising for the tool providers we've choosen to use. Our domain was registered in 1993 and it's got killer appeal in the web development world. We feel that having your name on our site is "too much to pay" for your software as we can very easily monetize that same ad space by selling it to someone else. I read all the "bru-haha" about the lack of a brand-free version and it seems that you are working on it (good!). Just let us know when you're ready to provide that and we'll go ahead and sign up. We are new to vB and because our forum content has yet to be exposed to the SEs, we'd like to start with your hack integrated.

4. What is the largest forum using your code? We have ported over about 500k posts already and running the natural language index building in vB took quite a bit of time. We are interested in any performance related data you can provide based on LARGE forums.

5. About, your content replication feature - how does it distinguish the "duplicated" content? Does it boil the title/thread title down to a URL and check to see if one exists? Or does it actually do some fuzzy content matching logic and come up with a "probability" of matching?

Thanks and Happy New Year!

3. Juan just posted recently that the branding free license will be available within the next 2 months.

4. www.advrider.com has over 2 million posts, though they are still in the process of installing vBSEO. (I just checked and they currently have it "turned off".) 365k posts on my site, www.fireblades.org, with no issues.

Hello noslzzp,

welcome to the board

1. A subforum is assumed to be "private" when it is not visible to the guest visitors (SE bots).
As for all outbound links modification, there is an option "Relnofollow ALL External URLs" to add rel="nofollow" attribute + the domains whitelist option.

2. Yes, you can use vBSEO on the dev instance of the forums (that is not accessible for the normal visitors and is used for testing purposes).

3. Bug?

4. The latest version of vBSEO is highly optimized and can be used on the very active forums without noticable performance impact (of course, there is some additional load though). vBSEO is used on a number of quite large communities (including those with more than 1M of posts).

5. Mm.. do you mean "Relevant Phrases Replacements" feature? It is used to put emphasis on the main topic-related phrases and doesn't replicate the whole content of pages/posts.

I hope these answers will help you

Thanks for the replies!

Regarding the "branding", will there be some option for people who have already purchased vBSEO to remove the branding at a later date? Our team is itching to release the new site but I am holding them back because 1) we have more work to do than they realize.. 2) I'd like to have this mod operational from day one. If we could remove the "branding" later, I think we could move forward with the purchase and deploy the mod on our development server.

The branding free option will be surely available for the existing customers (similar to new users) .