Thinking about installing vBSEO...

We've been tossing around the idea for quite some time about installing vBSEO on our forums, but not until recently have been seriously considering it.

So, I have a few questions..

We've been running our forums for a little over two years now and at the time of this post, we have 1,451 threads and 19,313 posts.

I know it's best to add SEO tools such as vBSEO to our forums at launch or very soon after. With my forums being older, how much would we still benefit with adding vBSEO? We already have pretty decent rankings, but obviously we'd always like to see better rankings

Do ALL of the existing URLs in my forums (threads, posts AND forums) get 301 redirected (eventually getting re-indexed in search engines)? I read in many threads that they do, but I just wanted to confirm. With the amount of links in our forums, it just gets me a bit concerned that vBSEO would be able to properly redirect all of them...

Does vBSEO automatically add keywords to pages? If so, how does it work?

Does vBSEO work with the rest of our plugins such as vBGallery, vBulletin Blogs, vBA Links, DownloadsII? If so or if not, would there be any negative interaction between vBSEO and any of our plugins that I should be concerned about?

it's never too late to install. Yesterday is always the best time, but tomorrow is yesterday today (damn, that's good... i should copyright that. haha)

All showthread.php?t=123 will be 301'd properly to the new re-written url. No links from othersites will die, and SE's will eventually pick up the new style URL's (usually about a month).

vbseo doesn't add keywords per say, but it does have a meta tag module, and also has a tool called relevant replacements. you can see the RR in action at the top of this page. vbseo.com uses the first X chars of the first post as a subheading.

vbseo works along side all known plugins... but it should be noted that vbseo is only designed to re-write vb and vb blog out of the box. All other plugins will need to have custom rewrite rules entered for them in the portal area, or they will not be re-written (but, the addons still work). 90% of the time, addons are coded so poorly (and vba links is one of them from personal experience) that vbseo can simply not fix it. I spent 5 days trying to get rules set up for vbalinks. I ended up re-coding half of it, pulled it all out of the /links folder, re wrote all the scripts to reference the new locations, and i still couldn't get everything re-written properly due to the 20 variances of every script. (ie, cat.php?a=1&b=2 is later listed as cat.php?b=2&a=1 and 20 other variations on complex multi-get vars)

Additionally, there's a sitemap generator (a seperate product (free) from vbseo) that also supports downloads II and a couple other add on modules. Plus, you can build your own for any pages from addons as well.

If you do decide to get vbseo'ed, i highly suggest taking a look at my ultimate guide (link in sig) and using those settings. They are proven to work great by many members here.

I think Brian answered all of your questions Alex, but please let us know if you need any further assistance.

Yesterday is always the best time, but tomorrow is yesterday today

Yes, thank you Brian!

I do have one other question though. About the rewriting URLs. I'm a fairly competent apps developer, but I have absolutely 0 experience with .htaccess stuff and rewrite rules. Are rewrite rules essentially regular expressions? Will I need to learn about this stuff in order to use vBSEO?

Believe it or not, I've been programming for about 4 years now and, until now, have yet to come across a situation where I needed to learn about regular expressions. Does anyone have any good recommendations on some good reading materials to bring me up to speed on this stuff?

htaccess makes use of regular expressions within it's syntax, but has many other types of directives as well.

Fortunately, advanced knowledge of htaccess is NOT required to use vBSEO. You just upload our provided .htaccess file (or add our code to your existing one, if in use) and you are done.

Within our vBSEO Control Panel, if you choose to use our Custom Rewrite Rules or Custom Redirects, you will find some very easy regular expression formats.

If interested, as a developer, you can check out this:
Apache Tutorial: .htaccess files

For just some basic info on regex, I would quickly skim over this:
Regular expression - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

NOTE: These resources are only provided for those with some experience in programming, and are NOT intended for the average vBSEO user. You do NOT need any experience with htaccess or regular expressions to install and use vBSEO.

awesome Joe, thanks! I'll be picking up vBSEO really soon

Welcome aboard Alex.

Hi Alex - if you submitted your order, please send me the order # so I can set up your license.

BTW - If you have any more questions, please let us know.