Tread Water or Jump In?

I have an established vBulletin forum that we are about ready to make the jump on and add VBSEO. We are currently running VB 3.6.8. We will likely wait 2-4 months before jumping to 3.7 after it is released. So, should we go ahead and upgrade to 3.6.9 and install VBSEO, or, wait until making the jump to 3.7 and install it at that time? Pro's/Con's? Would like to hear any input to help us with our decision.

Thanks!

I think 2-4 months is a quite significant time period for SEO. Therefore, I would have to suggest jumping in rather than waiting in this case.

I'd jump in right now. VBSEO is well worth it and works great on 3.6.9. In 2 to 4 month's all your old forum URL's will be re-indexed VBSEO style.

Thanks for the quick replies! A few of follow-up questions:

1. Our VB forum is part of a site we run on Joomla. There is NO connection between Joomla and the VB, besides skinning the forum to make it look like the rest of the site. Any possible issues we would run into with re-writes, etc? I'm guessing the re-writes only apply to the VB, correct?

2. Is there any maintenance, restructuring, etc. we should consider with VB *prior* to applying VBSEO to be setup for the best possible results?

3. Our site and this VB install runs on a dedicated Apache box, running RedHat RHE 5. Hardware is: 2.8 GHz 533FSB \ P4 Xeon, SCSI drives and 2GB ram. I've heard issues mentioned before about VBSEO causing a performance hit. Is there any "tuning" that we should consider with any settings prior to installing VBSEO in order to maintain fast response times? (The site averages 60-70,000 pageviews a day, of which 20 - 30,000 will be VB forum views.)

Thanks for your assistance.

Originally Posted by NICguy

Thanks for the quick replies! A few of follow-up questions:

1. Our VB forum is part of a site we run on Joomla. There is NO connection between Joomla and the VB, besides skinning the forum to make it look like the rest of the site. Any possible issues we would run into with re-writes, etc? I'm guessing the re-writes only apply to the VB, correct?

No issues at all. Existing links (referrals) pointing from Joomla to vB will get 301 redirected to the newly formated URL.

2. Is there any maintenance, restructuring, etc. we should consider with VB *prior* to applying VBSEO to be setup for the best possible results?

Install this: vBSEO Google/Yahoo Sitemap Generator for vBulletin 3.6.x, vBulletin 3.5.x & vBulletin 3.0.x

3. Our site and this VB install runs on a dedicated Apache box, running RedHat RHE 5. Hardware is: 2.8 GHz 533FSB \ P4 Xeon, SCSI drives and 2GB ram. I've heard issues mentioned before about VBSEO causing a performance hit. Is there any "tuning" that we should consider with any settings prior to installing VBSEO in order to maintain fast response times? (The site averages 60-70,000 pageviews a day, of which 20 - 30,000 will be VB forum views.)

If your *current* server load is low (0-1), vBSEO shouldn't have a noticeable impact in your load, if your load is in the 1-3 range, I suggest looking into the optimization tips here and here.

Cheers

Thank you for the info. Are the optimization tips listed included in the VBSEO install service?

NICguy, how did it go?

Haven't made the jump yet! We are preparing our customized skin for the upgrade to 3.7 and then, once it has proven stable fora couple weeks, will consider adding in the vBSEO. Have also bumped up the RAM on the server to 4GB (from 2GB) to give extra headroom.

Still waiting on an answer to the question of if the optimization items that are mentioned are part of the Installation Service.

Also, having thought about it some more, I'm wondering if the extra traffic the vBSEO should bring in would be beneficial! Yeah, I know that sounds strange, but, here's why.....

Our site is VERY narrowly focused on a particular geographic region - a SINGLE county in our state. So, if extra traffic would come in due to keywords that apply to our region (like store names, towns, events, etc) then that would be great. However, if traffic comes in on a generic subject, that really doesn't benefit us - in other words, if somebody visits the site from California because of a search that brings them to the site due to a posting about Godiva chocolates - well, that doesn't help us at all. We really don't want traffic outside our region as it dilutes the impact on our site as being strictly local. Make sense? Anybody else run into this type of thing - where "all traffic isn't good traffic?"

What is your business model? Ad revenue?

LOCAL ad sales generate our revenue. We do not accept link/banner exchanges or use Yahoo or Google ads - to advertise on the site you *must* be located in our county. We emphasize to advertisers that they do not compete with national ads or ads outside the local area.

Based on that model, a page view from California has no value to us as they aren't going to buy an oil change from somebody on the east coast. Pageviews from within our county are the most valuable, followed by views from people thinking about relocating to our area. With that in mind, somebody finding us because of an incoming link that referenced a local town would be good. A link coming in from some other state that was obtained due to a "generic" subject, such Godiva Chocolates is much less valuable.

We use Quantcast.com on the site to monitor where our traffic is coming from, which shows us traffic broken down to the city level. An increase of traffic due to using vBSEO that raised the numbers from *outside* our trading area would not be of real benefit to us.

Maybe you can send me you site URL so I can have a look.

If you are trying to harvest local traffic, then vBSEO can help of course. But you are correct, you may end up getting more traffic from users that are not a part of your demographic/local region.

I don't think there is a lot you can do to stop that extra traffic.

However, you might be able to structure your site better for local traffic that might bias against more generic traffic.