SEO

Launched a brand new sports forum at GoTeamsGo.com less than a week ago. vb & vbseo from the start on a domain that has been registered since 2003 but completely empty/unused until this year. Here's some details of what's happened.

First members signup and started posting: 2/8/06
First links from 2 external sites: 2/10/06.
Sitemap submitted to Google, verified & downloaded: 2/10/06
Additional external links: 2/12/06
Imported 383 threads, 1032 posts from my old forums: 2/11/06

1st MSN bot activity: 2/11/06
1st Googlebot activity: 2/10/06
1st Slurp activity: 2/13/06

Indexed pages as of 2/13/06
Google: 1 (no cache)
MSN: 28
Yahoo: 1 (from before golive)

So kudo's to MSN. Despite earlier Googlebot activity and the Google Sitemaps submission, MSN has found the site and indexed some pages while Google has shown nothing.

Feel free to drop by and chat about your favorite sports teams sometime

Ross

__________________
GoTeamsGo Sports Forum | 4.5 Months to Good Google Traffic with vBSEO

That's great news - Are you planning on customizing the skin?

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Juan Muriente / Crawlability Inc.
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Yes, just getting around to that now. This site ties into a large multiple domain project so the design aspect has to take into account many things. We'll be doing just a simple logo on the forum for the short term while we get settled with the muti domain plan.

MSN: no change
Yahoo: No change
Google: they finally show a cache of the index page but the cache is from before the forum was installed. Gotta love how freaking slow Google is these days

Indexed pages as of 2/17/06
Google: 1 (from before golive)
MSN: 96
Yahoo: 1 (from before golive)

Got my 1st real referral from MSN today

Google finally picked up some pages. They're indexed but they're from Feb 5 which is before we had any content (and before we had any links) so not expecting any referrals from them. The archive/sitemap pages are indexed but since they're all empty, they are mostly under the "we have omitted some entries very similar to the 26 already displayed" deal. G regularly downloads the sitemap file 5-7 times each day but it seems to do nothing so far as I have >600 threads.

Getting a few referrals every day from MSN.

Yahoo finally cached the homepage from a 2/13 crawl.

Indexed pages as of 2/21/06
Google: 37
MSN: 134
Yahoo: 1

Ross

Google's webmaster sitemap interface finally shows sitemap data. Took them 14 days since they made their 1st sitemap download until they acknowleged it by showing data.

Indexed pages as of 2/24/06
Google: 37
MSN: 203
Yahoo: 2

The site is growing slowly but nicely:
Threads: 676, Posts: 2,177, Members: 339, Active Members: 63
About half of that was imported from some old forums that I started & never really managed. We're doing about 70 posts/day.

Ross

Are you adding rel=nofollow to showpost? are you including them in the sitemap?

I recommend using the smart rel=nofollow option for showpost.

__________________
Juan Muriente / Crawlability Inc.
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Yes, we've got those rel nofollowed. I had T2DMan configure all my settings when I set up the site. He was a HUGE time saver to me since he has extensive SEO skills and extensive knowledge of VBSEO & vBulletin. I've got SEO skills but had no clue about vBulletin/vbseo so it made a lot of sense to pay him and save me the time it would have taken to figure it out on my own.


The GoTeamsGo Update:

We're 23 days since launch.

MSN has been on a tear. There was a big jump around 3/1 to about 900 pages, 1700 a day or 2 ago and now it's at 1932. Nice flow of referrals coming from MSN and a small amount from Google.

Indexed pages as of 3/3/06
Google: 41
MSN: 1,932
Yahoo: 7

The site continues to grow:
Threads: 896, Posts: 3,565, Members: 422, Active Members: 146

Isn't MSN rather great! Google is going through a mammouth update which is causing many issues at the moment, including being rather slow for lots of things.

It has been great working with rmjvol. Working on the wording of the forums, index page etc has been an interesting part as it always is with forums.

Can't wait to see what he gets up to with the skinning.

Today is the 1 month date from go live, but a short 28 day month.

Since I was 100% new to vBulletin & mostly new to running a forum, I had a hard time with expectations. In some ways, I've met expectations but in others I realize I was wrong on the front end.

I've got about 70 Search Engine referrals coming in each day. MSN has been a little flat recently while Google is trending upward. Ya-who? Nothing from them.

Indexed pages as of 3/8/06
Google: 133
MSN: 1,890
Yahoo: 14

I'm pretty happy with how the forum is growing wrt members & posts:
Threads: 1,091, Posts: 4,825, Members: 450, Active Members: 174

I've just started testing a bit of monetization so nothing to report there.

All in all, not a bad 1st month on this fun project.

Tomorrow will be 6 weeks since go live.

Yesterday was somewhat of a milestone for SEO. I passed 100 SE referrals for the 1st time and it's mostly Google. G had a big leap in referrals, going from its typical 20-40/day to 77 yesterday. MSN also showed its best referral day yesterday with 53. So 136 SE referrals yesterday beat the previous high of 86.

The big Google increase seemed to coincide with a jump in indexed pages. Had been around 133 for 2 wks & went to 290 a couple days ago. They now show all forums/subforums plus a decent number of threads in the index. Still a long way to go but it's steady progress.

Nothing from Yahoo.

Indexed pages as of 3/21/06
Google: 290
MSN: 2,953
Yahoo: 25 (was 40 yesterday)

Still relatively happy with how the forum is growing wrt members & posts:
Threads: 1,501, Posts: 7,256, Members: 507, Active Members: 224

Will soon implement some hacks to encourage signups/postings.

Ross

I want to congratulate you on the excellent job you've done so far with your site.

Also I'd like to commend T2DMan for his...and I quote rmjvol:

Excellent job at supporting vBSEO owners on their installation!...Thank you!

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Ilia Muriente / VP / Crawlability Inc.
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Absolutely, the money invested in Michael's service has paid off very well.

I see that several of Google's datacenters are showing 900+ pages indexed so I'm hoping that we're close to a large increase in the daily referrals. My goal is to hit 250 referrals/day by April 1.

One thing I'd like to mention that I'm doing (which is outside the normal vbseo hack) is adjusting thread titles. If you've got a basic understanding of SEO, you know that page titles and anchor text are a large part of the SEO puzzle. By tweaking the title of threads, I've been able to increase the referral chances greatly.

For example, I had a member post a thread with this title:
"What Sports Figure Do You Hate the Most?"

By editing the title to "Most Hated Athletes", I'm now targeting a phrase that gets about 400 searches/month according to one kw suggestion tool. The goal is to not fundamentally change the topic of the title but give your forum a chance of getting more visitors with little extra work.

I'm only editing about 5-10% of the thread titles but I can see that those threads are making up a large share of the SE reerrals that I receive. I'm not a heavy handed SEO so I'm not usually editing the title as much as I did on that thread. Usually adding/removing/changing 1 or 2 words is all you need to do.

Good luck,
Ross

8 weeks after go live.

Google and MSN have been kinda stagnant this past week. Traffic has not increased like I had hoped since my last post so I'll go have a chat with Larry & Sergey about that.

Yahoo has finally starting indexing the site. It hasn't translated into referrals yet but at least it's progress.

Indexed pages as of 4/4/06
Google: 221 (slight drop, whatever...)
MSN: 5,735 (big jump)
Yahoo: 693

Search Engine referrals continue to be around 100/day.

Still relatively happy with how the forum is growing wrt members & posts:
Threads: 2,012, Posts: 10,092, Members: 597, Active Members: 224

Michael helped me to implement the Articlebot hack last week. We're using Google News feeds to auto create threads. Only doing this in a handful of forums but it helps the less active subforums to stay looking active. I'll probably slowly roll it out to additional parts of GoTeamsGo.

Good luck, Ross

10 weeks after go live.

Google traffic dropped off sharply after my last post. In the course of about 10 days it went from about 70/day down to almost nothing. But that was a temporary issue, traffic is now up even higher than before.

Like many people, I experienced a large jump in the indexed pages listed by Google this past week. Google traffic increased nicely to about 150% of the previous maximum. MSN traffic has been sliding and Yahoo traffic is still practically nonexistent.

Indexed pages as of 4/23/06
Google: 17,100 (big jump was around 4/18)
MSN: 3,214
Yahoo: 48

Search Engine referrals are increasing. The past few days have been in the 150-190 range and trending upward.

Threads: 2,449, Posts: 12,607, Members: 648, Active Members: 181
My active members have dropped a bit but I've been mostly offline for the past week or so. I knew ahead of time that my absence could lead to a little slide in activity. Hopefully, we'll reverse that trend pretty soon.

Good luck, Ross