AlpineZone Forums SEO Progress

[AlpineZone]

I just purchased vBSEO and look forward to implementing it. First some history. Up until late last month I was running phpBB with the Able To Know SEO mod applied to it. I was pretty happy with the results. An inefficient fetching script caused me to convert to vBulletin. So far I'm glad I did - it's completely superior to phpBB. It took some time to rework the fetching to display forum elements on other pages of the site, but I'm in pretty good shape so far.

The next step is getting the forums re-indexed. Here are my results as of today (haven't installed vBSEO yet):

Google: 9,670
Yahoo!: 36,200
MSN: 356

Many of the results are old phpBB pages, some SEO optimized, some not. These links are mostly all dead. What is the best way to deal with that? Should I just have the Search Engines remove the forum from their indeces entirely and then resubmit the new vBSEO-optimized vBulletin forum via site maps? Or just go ahead and apply vBSEO and submit the sitemap and wait for all the old pages to purge? Also, should I just start with the vBSEO default settings?

[Joe Ward]

Are you getting any significant traffic from any of the old threads? Perhaps you could consider 301-ing the any page that gets a lot of hits to its equivalent page in your new vBulletin/vBSEO powered forum.

[AlpineZone]

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

Are you getting any significant traffic from any of the old threads? Perhaps you could consider 301-ing the any page that gets a lot of hits to its equivalent page in your new vBulletin/vBSEO powered forum.

There are likely several hundred that do. I set up vBSEO to simply redirect 404s to the main forum page.

[AlpineZone]

I use fps_external.php to generate RSS/XML files which I then read on the rest of my site to display a "Recent Discussions" list. e.g. go to http://www.alpinezone.com/ and scroll down a bit and look in the left border. These links use the old URLs. Is this something I need to be concerned about. It seems that vBSEO redirects them to the optimized URLs. I'm just concerned that this might be a PageRank drain or view as duplicate content. Thoughts?

Also, how do I update the page titles (< TITLE > tags) to not include the forum name when viewing posts or the "Powered by vBulletin" when viewing the index page? Is this a vBSEO thing or simply a vBulletin setting/template change?

[AlpineZone]

Originally Posted by AlpineZone

Also, how do I update the page titles (< TITLE > tags) to not include the forum name when viewing posts or the "Powered by vBulletin" when viewing the index page? Is this a vBSEO thing or simply a vBulletin setting/template change?

Nevermind. Template change.

[Oleg Ignatiuk]

I use fps_external.php to generate RSS/XML files which I then read on the rest of my site to display a "Recent Discussions" list. e.g. go to http://www.alpinezone.com/ and scroll down a bit and look in the left border. These links use the old URLs. Is this something I need to be concerned about. It seems that vBSEO redirects them to the optimized URLs. I'm just concerned that this might be a PageRank drain or view as duplicate content. Thoughts?

All dynamic vB URLs are redirected to the SEO URLs, so it should not be a problem.
However, as far as I know, there is a vBSEO compatibility option for FPS_External now (thanks Kevin! ): http://www.cinvin.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1478.

[AlpineZone]

Originally Posted by Oleg Ignatiuk

All dynamic vBulletin URLs are redirected to the SEO URLs, so it should not be a problem.
However, as far as I know, there is a vBSEO compatibility option for FPS_External now (thanks Kevin! ): http://www.cinvin.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1478.

Cool. thanks. If you think it will be okay to run the old URLs for the time being, I'll wait until he officially releases the next fps_external. Glad to see Kevin is trying vBSEO as well. His script really has saved me!

[AlpineZone]

Originally Posted by AlpineZone

Google: 9,670
Yahoo!: 36,200
MSN: 356

It's been close to a month. I'm now at:

Google: 9,110
Yahoo!: 50,000
MSN: 1,173

The slight drop in Google is likely a result of the old pages getting purged which is fine. I notice several hundred pages getting added daily via the Site Map. Some nice increases with MSN and Yahoo! as well. We're entering the slowest time of the year for my site (a Northeast U.S. ski site) so it'll be interesting to see how the traffic does next Fall. Glad I have a few months to get all the old URLs purged. Looking good so far.

My visitors per day almost doubled immediately since installing vBSEO and so far in April (again - slower month) we're at February levels (one of the busiest months) despite having some downtime this month due to server issues. So far I'm satisfied. I'll report back in a month...

[AlpineZone]

Wow. Big Google jump over the weekend - now reporting 15,000 URLs...

[Joe Ward]

Great boost. Congrats!

[AlpineZone]

Originally Posted by AlpineZone

Wow. Big Google jump over the weekend - now reporting 15,000 URLs...

Check that. Make it 16,000!

[Joe Ward]

And climbing.

[AlpineZone]

16,900.....unreal!

[gcc llc]

I had the same thing as well on Easter Sunday. Went from 25,000, to 42,000 and now too 68,000. Traffic has doubled!

[Joe Ward]

Google's Easter Present.