Thinking about buying

Hello, I've been thinking about purchasing this for a little bit and wanted to ask a few questions first.

1. I'm currently ranking for two of my main keywords. The first one is out of 43 million results and the second one is out of over 73 Million results. If I make the switch to vBSEO, will I loose these rankings? I can't afford to slip at these at all, they drive the majority of my traffic every month (4-5k monthly)

2. I'm ranking well for a plethora of other key search terms that are driving a decent amount of SE traffic to my site currently (around 1.5k a month via Google) will these secondary pages drop, stay the same or even gain some ground. The search phrases on these aren't highly coveted or competetive but they drive good traffic every month.

3. I read where "vBSEO achieves link consensus". Isn't this the same thing as the canonical URL tag, and maybe a good robots.txt, if its not can someone explain the difference?

(2 questions left I promise)

4. I also read that vBSEO eliminates duplicate content, and the penalty associated with duplicate content? Wouldn't the "canonical url" tag do the same, and what about the "Penalty Myth" itself, it appears a recent change to google eliminates this automatically? Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Duplicate content and multiple site issues

5. The feedback forum here seems to have a recent hash of "not very good results". Is this due to lack of knowledge on the admins part, the product, or recent changes to search algorithms that haven't been accounted for yet?

Thanks for your time in reading this and answering any questions. I look foward to a response and hopefully getting a vBSEO Powered site soon!

Welcome and thanks for your interest in our product

1 +2) all current url's are 301'ed to the new seo-friendly url. We can't guarantee anything due to it being out of our control. Most of the time, you will lose the ranking for about a week or so and then gain it back again after google has done its thing. It's out of everyones hands but google's.
In my opinion, it's worth taking the hit for a couple weeks. Imagine the search terms you are MISSING our on ranking on? 4-5k from 2 threads is great.... but imagine 4-5k visitors from EVERY one of your threads? While a stretch, it is possible. At the very least, you will see a far greater number of your threads ranking better, and thus, more traffic.

3) Conical tags are implemented by vbseo as well. While they have the same "goal" they do not have the same effect. with more than 1 way to access the site, there's still 2 pages (or more) that can be ranked, effectively splitting your chances in half as you are fighting yourself. Further, not all search engines support conical references. This also has a big to do with back links. you will give users 1 url to 1 resource, no matter what.

4) This has slowly evolved over time to not be as big of an error as it used to be. However, it is still considered best practice to have only 1 url to 1 resource. This goes beyond what a conical url can do. For example, showpost scripts are turned into (optional) a permalink, ie, thread.html#postid bookmarks. Putting a conical on the showpost script to the showthread would be invalid, as it is not the same content.

5) With most things, you usually find people far more eager to complain than to compliment. We have sold thousands of licenses. Most of our customers own multiple licenses. We wouldn't get the 2nd sale from them if it didn't help their first site.
While it would be wrong to point a finger to the admin, it is the case a lot of the time. Some expect vbseo to be the "install and #1 OMG!!!" solution. It's not and we never claim it to be. Some have brand new sites with 10 threads competing against several 5+ mill post forums in their niche. It is VERY hard to beat the older, established community when the site is young. Some people don't understand that. Content is STILL and will ALWAYS be king. vBSEO does the hard part for you, but its not the only part to consider to fully optimize a website. Page design, weight, the actual content, skin weight, skin html semantic validation, server connection times, domain age, and all the rest play a big factor in rankings as well. This is why we also have our critique forum available to help you optimize your site beyond what vbseo can systematically do for you.


Let us know if you have any more questions

Thanks for the response.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

Welcome and thanks for your interest in our product

1 +2) all current url's are 301'ed to the new seo-friendly url. We can't guarantee anything due to it being out of our control. Most of the time, you will lose the ranking for about a week or so and then gain it back again after google has done its thing. It's out of everyones hands but google's.

Thats a pretty big risk, I'm not sure I'm wanting to take it yet, especially with the recent feedback from most users not obtaining the results as intended.

In my opinion, it's worth taking the hit for a couple weeks. Imagine the search terms you are MISSING our on ranking on? 4-5k from 2 threads is great.... but imagine 4-5k visitors from EVERY one of your threads? While a stretch, it is possible. At the very least, you will see a far greater number of your threads ranking better, and thus, more traffic.

Sounds like its a complete toss up to me. Theres a chance it will work, and a chance it won't. If it doesn't not only am I out the $150, but also the site will be devastated in its overall value. I'm not much of a gambler, especially when it comes to something I've worked so hard to build for so long.

Thanks for the time to respond, I will probably test it with a new project down the road with a site thats been steadily growing to see if I can get results.

A new site will never be a good test for an established site conversion. The established site will perform far better and earlier on simply due to the sheer mass of content, back links, and domain age advantages over a new site. I also think that's what you are comparing your fears against. A site with 5 threads will rarely ever rank well and get serious traffic from the search engines, vbseo or not.

Even before i was a staff member here, vbseo was the #1 best thing i ever installed on my forum back in 2006. I would, as a customer, not as a salesman (which isn't my role here anyway), highly recommend you install it. It really is worth it and 99% of the time our users have shown huge success with it.

Me personally, i had about 3 bad weeks after install, but week 4 i quadrupled my traffic and it's gained steadily since.

I'd guess at least half of our customers have multiple license. Some larger clients have 50-100 copies. We wouldn't get sale 2-100 if it didn't work for them.

Don't let the naysayers bring you down.

I'm still thinking about this, but the recent news of vB4 I'm going to wait for sure, but in the mean time one last question.

I know vBSEO has done a good job of supporting vBulletin addons in the past (vB Blog), will you continue to do so with the CMS?

Also, will there be any price increase in the product, like the shenanigans that just unfolded at .com.

Thanks again for your time, and I look forward to purchasing once 4.0 hits.

Yes, vbseo will fully support the entire Suite in vb4. see our official annoucement for more details and pricing:
vB4 and vBSEO 3.5 Upcoming Release Notes