Hi guys,

It's true that vBSEO will always be whitehat. There is no reason to believe that a vBSEO enabled forum will ever receive a resulting penalty.

As far as hacking goes, it is true that a copyright notice makes it easy for hackers to identify sites running vBSEO. However, this can easily be done even without a copyright or reference to vBSEO in place on a board. I'm not giving anything away a hacker would not already know, so I don't mind mentioning two obvious methods:

1. vBSEO Characteristics - They could examine forums for characteristics that indicate vBSEO is installed on the forum such as a huge indexed page count, high PageRank, and top positions for 1000s of long tail search queries at Google... and they would know that was a vBSEO powered forum for certain! In all seriousness, they can examine the forum for CRUs, etc, and flag it as vBSEO powered.

2. Brute Force - They can just unlease an attack on all forums. Those containing a security exploit would be vulnerable. Those without them would not. Computing power is cheap. BTW There have never been any known security exploits in vBSEO.

Therefore, removal of the copyright is not going to provide much protection in this regard. Fortunately, no security problems exist with vBSEO. Your forum gets all the benefits of the full SEO solution, minus any risk.

Obviously, there are other reasons people have for requesting a branding free option. As we've stated, it is an option for the future, although no firm decision or ETA has been provided.

Watch future upcoming announcements for possible information on this topic.