SEO

Our site has been running for 3 months now and VBseo has been installed since day one. I don't seem to be seeing much progress with our site listings, we have over 6000 VBSEO urls. It took nearly 2 months just to get over 100 listings on google. It then went to 1500 and has been hovering around that for over a month now. Should I be expecting this? feel free to have a look at the site at: Animalgossip.com - Where gossip really talks

Here are the current stats after 3 months: :(

Google: 1570
Yahoo: 45
MSN: 249

If someone can help that would be great.

I'd say you need a lot more backlinks. Submit your site to directories all over the place. Post on similar forums with your link in the footer (like you have on vbseo)

Actually, don't just post your url. Post keywords around your keyworded link.

Hmmm. What the heck is your site about? You don't have a description in the headers and your welcome block doesn't describe the site either.

Anyway, I'll guess...

Bird, cat and dog lovers share animal stories and pet tips at AnimalGossip.com!

I'd suggest (from 1st hand experience) to be patient. 3 months might not be long enough to get established.

I'm a full time SEO and it took 4.5 months to really get some decent action from Google. That's with doing a ton of extra work that most forum owners don't do in the early stages. Now I'm 6 months from golive and getting 500-1000 referrals from SE's every day.

Read thru my forum's progress. I hope that will help you set some expectations for a brand new forum that spent extra time & extra money (besides just buying vbseo) to get started.

Good luck, Ross

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

Some additional thoughts & observations.

Looks like you've been live for 2 months & 3 weeks. Again, not long enough to establish a new site in Google.

Here's the biggest problem: You've got almost no unique content.

All the threads (or at least all the ones I saw) in your busy sub-forums are scraped content from rss feeds. 2/3 of the total posts and I'd guess more than 2/3 of your total threads are 100% duplicate content you pulled from another site. Gaining SE success solely via heavy dependence on rss feeds is over. Unless you do a lot of other things well (like getting tons of links & a high PR), it's not gonna work.

I use rss feeds in some cases but 95% of them are edited so they're different than anybody else who might be publishing the same story. Plus 90% of the rss generated threads have real, unique, human replies attached to them.

My hand edited rss feed posts make up about 2-3% of my forum's activity. It looks like you're getting most of your content from automated stuff.

Your "Today's Posts" show 42 threads. Only 4 of them have *any* real posts in them. And those posts only total about 100 words... only 100 words for an entire day.

Put yourself in Google's shoes. They don't want to list 10,000 different pages that scraped news from the purina site. If I was Google, I might flag sites that try to use rss feeds too heavily without adding any unique content to them. I'd make it hard for sites like yours to rank well since I've now seen that you try to take shortcuts.

Nothing personal but I think you're not gonna see decent success until you put in more time, effort, money & work on your forum. vbseo is a great tool but it's not magic.

There's a lot of people here who will help you (I just gave you about 20 minutes of my time) but you've got to generate real content. Or at least content that *looks* unique.

Ross