Why I find it so hard to buy...

I have been looking to get VBSEO for some time now and have read the success stories as well as those who are adamant that its not necessary. Unlike some of the webmasters from larger forums, I am actually not very concerned at loosing backlinks (as some have reported) or having to wait initially before BigDaddy decides to do his clean up job. The reason is that I notice I lost a considerable amount of backlinks when I upgraded my site and moved servers about 6 months ago. I am down to 26.7k in google backlinks (attached image as proof for futher reference if I finally get VBSEO) as opposed to the 52k+ I once had. Let me tell you the traffic did stumble a bit. Could VBSEO save the day? Quite possibly, but...

What is hindering me from pulling the trigger is that I am quite frankly scared at all the darn features, fear of setting the wrong option, and not getting it optimized properly. If my site was strictly a VBB forum, I would be a little less concerned, but its the gotta do this, figure out that, oh wait I should add that, scouring on the VBSEO forum to find the solution, etc. etc... that has kept me away from pulling the trigger.

My site, msdhw.com, currently has VB3 Forum, VBadvanced CMPS, VBa gallery, ecDownloads 3.3, and a couple static pages and besides installing VBseo, I would like to get the Custom Mod Rewrites working and also the goog/yhoo sitemap generator installed.

I am open to hear your thoughts if I can get an expert to install it "properly/optimized" to give me some peace of mind that would be great too. The least I could do is write a review if it all works out in the end to dispell the skeptics.

Sincerely,

Ivan

Backlinks for Msdhw.com 2/20/06 showing 26.7k:
http://www.indexofimages.com/uploads/d192685b2a.jpg

Great Question... I will post a rather comprehensive response for this shortly.

Juan, I look forward to your reply. Thanks in advance, Ivan

mudanoman--

I used someone's custom settings right after I installed vbseo in may of last year and wasn't necessarilly getting the response I wanted. Much to my pain, on December 31st, I decided to ditch the settings and go straight outta the box with no changes at all. I knew I would take a dive, but take a look at the attachment.

Straight up, it has exceeded everything.

I have vba and vba gallery and have really not seen a way that works for my gallery yet, so that would be the only caveat I would offer.

Originally Posted by glorify

mudanoman--

I used someone's custom settings right after I installed vbseo in may of last year and wasn't necessarilly getting the response I wanted. Much to my pain, on December 31st, I decided to ditch the settings and go straight outta the box with no changes at all. I knew I would take a dive, but take a look at the attachment.

Straight up, it has exceeded everything.

I have vba and vba gallery and have really not seen a way that works for my gallery yet, so that would be the only caveat I would offer.

Great site! I was living in SD not too long ago. Anyway, thanks for sharing the saturation graph I really think this product can do its job. However, as I stated earlier and as you mentioned, the settings are crucial on how well the job gets done. I really look forward to what Juan has to say.

Btw, was there an increase in traffic after the spike up?

Best,

Ivan

Originally Posted by mudanoman

What is hindering me from pulling the trigger is that I am quite frankly scared at all the darn features, fear of setting the wrong option, and not getting it optimized properly.

I was in a similar boat. I've done SEO for years but had little experience with forums and zero with vBulletin. I'm confident that I could have come up with most of the features of vbseo on my own but it would have taken me dozens of hours to get everything just right.

My solution was to purchase vbseo and hire T2DMan to help me get up and going correctly from the start. He's done a great job for me.

He started right away and (via AIM) stepped me through the choices with good explanations of advantages/disadvantages of the decisions we were making. You can see the fees that he charges over at his own forum. It's not a small investment but after reading through his posts here and on his own SEO forums, I was confident about the investment.

I'm 2 weeks past completion and I'm a satisfied customer. The cost of purchasing VBSEO & hiring Michael was small compared to what my time is worth had I tried to do all this on my own.

Good luck, Ross

Originally Posted by rmjvol

I was in a similar boat. I've done SEO for years but had little experience with forums and zero with vBulletin. I'm confident that I could have come up with most of the features of vbseo on my own but it would have taken me dozens of hours to get everything just right.

My solution was to purchase vbseo and hire T2DMan to help me get up and going correctly from the start. He's done a great job for me.

He started right away and (via AIM) stepped me through the choices with good explanations of advantages/disadvantages of the decisions we were making. You can see the fees that he charges over at his own forum. It's not a small investment but after reading through his posts here and on his own SEO forums, I was confident about the investment.

I'm 2 weeks past completion and I'm a satisfied customer. The cost of purchasing VBSEO & hiring Michael was small compared to what my time is worth had I tried to do all this on my own.

Good luck, Ross

Thanks Ross. Now I wonder why VBSEO doesn't have a team of installers. Btw, how is your site going after the install?

Best,

Ivan

Originally Posted by mudanoman

Great site! I was living in SD not too long ago. Anyway, thanks for sharing the saturation graph I really think this product can do its job. However, as I stated earlier and as you mentioned, the settings are crucial on how well the job gets done. I really look forward to what Juan has to say.

Btw, was there an increase in traffic after the spike up?

Best,

Ivan

Thanks for the kudos! Yep, traffic has spiked up with the search engine saturation. No noticeable increase in Google's PR--I was a 4 before I started and am still a 4. It'll be interesting to see what this year brings.

Juan, any update? Dont want to bother you, just anxious. -Ivan

Today before end of day - we are working hard at getting some neat features into 2.4.1 that I want to mention/discuss in this thread

Juan,

When commenting on this, it would be nice to have you put it in terms of "you can achieve this % of what VBSEO can give you right out of the box with the default settings, then if you fine tune, you can expect...."

Thanks

Originally Posted by Juan Muriente

Today before end of day

Juan,
Interested to hear your thoughts.

Locking until I get a chance to respond. Sorry...