vBulletin, an SEO nightmare... here are some tips

Yeah, I've used it on a couple sites. Site 1 increased traffic by 70%. Site 2 was a little more nichier, but traffic was increased by 40%.

On both sites, indexed pages increased dramatically.

I never really took the time to check out VB's backend to see how everything is setup. I liked how VBSEO worked, so I just bought it. It's paid for itself many times over and I recommend it.

 

How long were you running the forum(s) before vbseo was installed - and what other SEO have you done ?

 

For those who would like to turn off their vBulletin archive without messing up inbound links (e.g. from SEs) to archived pages, here is a set of .htaccess instructions that will reroute requests for archived pages to the "real" page:

RewriteEngine  on
RewriteRule ^archive/index.php/f-([0-9]+).html http://{YOUR_FOURUM'S_DOMAIN}/forumdisplay.php?f=$1 [R=301]
RewriteRule ^archive/index.php/t-([0-9]+).html http://{YOUR_FOURUM'S_DOMAIN}/showthread.php?t=$1 [R=301]

Code (markup):

You may need to adjust the directory path and of course put your own domain name in.

Once you add this code to your .htaccess file you can turn off your vBulletin archive via the admin panel.

 

Isn't that one of the things that vBSEO does automatically?

 

The purpsoe of my entry isn't to change the primary URL everyone sees, rather it is to redirect archive URLs to the proper place using a 301 Redirect so that SEs will dump the archive URLs quicker.

In regards to vBSEO, I follow Chris Beasley's advice of steering clear of if. Like he says, the moment you install vBSEO you become totally dependent upon it continuing to be supported and if support for it ever stops your up shit creek. There are a lot of vBulletin mods we use that would cause minor annoyances if support for them stopped--vBSEO isn't one of them. If you install vBSEO then you can't upgrade vBulletin until an update for vBSEO is also available without risking losing all of the "good" that vBSEO did for your SEO efforts.

No matter how you cut it, the long term risk of vBSEO make it a very bad idea, given that many of vBulletin's SEO issues can be resolved without installing any mod.

 

The forums were purchased and then re-vamped. I think they were online for 1 year and the other 2 1/2 years.

Other SEO work? Is this an interview? haha. I've worked with Fortune 1000 companies and everything in-between. Seen (and done) a lot. I've purchased a few links from your sites in the past via LinkWorth.

 

thankx for sharing the tips,very helpful.

 

The reason I ask is because How do you know vBSEO was the reason for increased indexing / spidering? How do you know it wasnt due to other SEO efforts - such as obtaining backlinks -

 

VBSEO was the only SEO I added. Sites were already well indexed (or so I thought until I installed) and had lots of links coming, as well as ranking for target keywords.

 

vbseo rocks

Only people who moan about vbseo being crap are those who havent used it or those who are using it and dont want others to use it to keep competing forums at bay.

I have 4 forums with vbseo installed and they all doing pretty well and people who talk about vbseo being just a url rewrite mod need to learn more about vbseo before commenting about it.

Dont try to correct me if you think I am wrong coz its you who need to see the vbseo control panel before you talk so go and get thier demo version and insall it on a test forum and see for yourself

end of the argument. VBSEO rocks

 

Bull crap. I this past weekend I discovered I had it installed on one of my forums to control user sigs and like so many mods it has some dirty coding issues caused by sloppy/lazy coding. We were migrating our forum to a new server which ran PHP5 and MySQL5 and vBSEO was one of the mods that was causing vBulletin to spit out PHP errors because of really stupid and really lazy syntax errors.

You'll never find me giving out bad advice simply to keep competition at bay because: 1) it does not work; and 2) there are much easier and more effective ways to beat the competition at the SEO game.

Also if you bother reading the articles I linked to over at http://www.websitepublisher.net you will see that not only does he talk the talk in regards to not using the vBSEO mod, but he walks the walk as you can see for yourself that he does not use the mod in his forums. Chris is one of the most successful SEO's and web publishers I know and he is also one of the most generous in that he very willingly shares his knowledge.

So without realizing it I did have vBSEO on one of my forums and it does do a few things other than rewriting URLs. It is the rewriting of vBulletin URLs I am advising people not to use as this could pose long term problems and is completely unnecessary.

Also as I discovered this past weekend, vBSEO has some sloppy code and syntax errors that will not pass muster on PHP5, which is less forgiving of sloppy coding practices. In particular, its coder has a habit of leaving out semi-colons in places they should really be used but are not required under PHP4. This means that one will have to fix vBSEO coding errors when it comes time to upgrade to PHP5 (if for no other reason than to be running on a more secure platform).

 

Uh - No I dont. I need to see results.

Ever since vBSEO came out I have asked over and over, and never received an answer. Show me some EVIDENCE that rewriting URLs does something positive. Not your conjecture or beliefs, but some evidence. Show me, how with no other SEO work (ie getting more links) an established site, adds vbseo, and climbs in the rankings for some decent terms.

Nobody has ever shown me that. The control panel is meaningless to me, results are whats important.

 

I just did.

 

Your the first - but - you didnt include any details. Where did the increased traffic come from? Google? Yahoo? When did the increase start? Etc etc.

 

Indeed and my hunch is that any of this increase thanks to vBSEO could have been accomplished fairly easily without vBSEO simply by following some of the advice above to eliminate duplicate content penalties.

 

Traffic plateaud and then when I added VBSEO, it went up, very simple here. What search engines are irrevelant. Traffic went up from all SE's.

Maybe...maybe not. Fact is, is that when I added VBSEO, traffic and rankings went up. Anything else that is said is just a theory and should be proven and really shouldn't be discussed, cause it hasn't been tested or proven as a fact.

I also really believe that having various keywords within the URLs help a lot.

 

There are PLENTY of nearly 'stock' forums with top SE listings. I am convinced High Quality incoming links are soley going to determine your position (a long with keyword rich content so it knows when to list you) ..

vbSEO DEFINITELY has risks. I am convinced it has got me dropped from google b/c of a 'bad configuration'. I was not redirecting original content .. and was using full virtual paths for the subforums. Several times the script has crashed my server with CPU overloading and would continue until the vbSEO code was removed from .htaccess. Like they said .. even if it works for you now. You WILL be dependant on it .. and if theres an exploit or uncompatability issue with a VB update .. your SCREWED. ALL of your listings will be missing pages.

As far as what it does.. it would work in theory.. b/c you would have keywords in the urls for some PR bonus points .. but right now is too buggy and certain configurations leave loop holes. And i bet exploits arent too far behind..

 

Including the theory that vBSEO was the cause of the improvement. Just because the two coincided doesn't prove there is a cause and effect relationship.

The fact remains that once you use any type of URL rewriting with vBulletin, including vBSEO your are locked into that URL rewriting and in the case of vBSEO this means you had better hope and pray that it continues to be supported with new updates in a timely fashion when vBulletin has major updates. In the long run this is a very risky bet.

As others have pointed out there are plenty of examples of vBulletin forums ranking very well in search results without any form of URL rewriting.

The keywords may have helped and it would have been nice if the folks at vBulletin had a little more SEO savvy (it is all too apparent they are SEO clueless), however, I'm not convinced that this is such a huge help as to make all that big of a difference in the big picture. After all most thread titles are horrid. Just look through any sampling of fifty thread titles here at DP.

Can vBSEO help? Sure it can; HOWEVER, as I have repeated pointed out many of the things that vBSEO does to help SEO can be done without vBSEO or really aren't that big of a deal. If someone simply follows the advice I provided in my first post in this thread and in the links I provided, they will go a long way towards improving the SEO of their forums without becoming absolutely dependent upon a mod that may or may not be supported and updated in a timely fashion into the "distant" future.

It should also be noted that by the very nature of what it does (rewriting URLs on the fly) vBSEO does increase server overhead, which can become an issue on a really busy forum like DP. This could directly lead to higher hosting costs as one could be forced to go to a dedicated server or multiple servers much sooner than if they didn't have vBSEO running on their forum (hmm... vBulletin optimization for server load would be another good thread).

 

A couple of great points.

 

vbSEO is not bad indeed but it's critical if you run a pretty big forum because it's another performance critical addon.

vBulletin's querystrings are pretty short, I wouldn't worry to much about having the keywords in every URL, google does index URLs with short querystrings quite well.

I bought vBSEO 6 months ago and it's running on a very big forum but I have several other forums running without it and they are indexing quite well, too. I guess I wouldn't really buy it again, it's not really worth 150$ (imo!).