i am saving up for vbulletin+vbseo to start a forum, should i start the vbulletin forum as i save enough for it and add vbseo later or wait till i can implement both together. starting it immediately will help me get a kick start with the members and publicity and threads, but it will lead to a lot of dead urls later once vbseo is implemented with the url rewriting what do you think i should do? thanks.
well , your query answers itself . if you need vbseo and if you are confident about your forums then start the both at once !
thanks for the replies, so far looks like i should save for both and implement them together, more feedback would be nice.
Getting them together is the best idea. If you get VBSEO after having your forum established it can be a real headache trying to redirect all of your old VB links to their new VBSEO links. Also, VBSEO really helps get your posts indexed quickly and you will notice that with it you will get more organic traffic right off the bat.
If you have the money then go for vbulletin and vbseo at the same time. Lets say that you don't install vbseo at the start and you use normal vbulletin. Pages from your forum are going to be indexed in the search engines with dynamic urls, i.e. showthread.php?t=1342. Say you decide to install vbseo after 3 months and you enable url rewriting to produce static urls, i.e. www.domain.com/f12/this-is-a-thread-title.html, all the pages that are indexed in the search engines will need to be re-indexed because the links that it currently has no longer exist (according to a spider). If you install vbseo and someone clicks on one of your older links, it will still arrive at the same thread, don't worry about that, it simply gets redirected. But when a spider looks for that url, it won't find it so it will think it's gone and it will be removed from the index. Now you need to wait until the spiders crawl your whole site and reindex each new url. By the way, vbseo is so much more than a url rewriting plugin, I can assure you. So in summary, I would say go for both together at the start IF you can afford it. If not, it's not a major deal, your posts will be reindexed and depending on how many posts you have in the serps, depends on how long it will take to reindex them. Hope this helps.
thanks for the replies..i wasnt aware that previous urls would redirect, but it still seems that i should implement them both together. i guess i should check out the features page. wonder why dp does not use vbseo.
why do you want to start with VB especially when you are starting one and new to forums?? VB and VB seo together may cost $500, if you use a free software you can spend the $500 promoting your forum. If your forum gets big you can convert it to VB several big forums run on free open source softwares, its just my two cents
well, with vb and seo together i think they cost around $3XX, i've tried maintaining forums before, in phpbb and also using the not so popular bbpress, the first time it grew to around 250 members before spam destroyed it, the second time i had things under control with spam but indexing was a problem with google, no idea why, together i would have sitemaps, rss, proper urls, other features which i need for management like akismet for spam, the infraction system for mods, etc. and as far as promoting us concerned, the forum would be a part of a blog bringing in 300-600 visitors per day, so promoting it should be easy than starting a forum from scratch on a new domain. Thanks for your input.
what about the templates?? Anyway phpbb has come a long way and phpbb SEO is one of the best SEO mod around and indexing is not a problem with them. Check the forum in my signature if you want to check the URL but yes Modding can be a problem. But as far as spam is concerned every software is vulnerable to it, even DP got some bot attack a month before I think, you can prevent bots registering easily through just ading a question or cpathca for posting, SO that is not a problem. But if you have the greens go for Vb, lol follow the conventional wisdom, the popular choice must be the best choice
Why not check out the demo pages at vbseo and see what it's like! http://www.vbseo.com/demo/ Digitalpoint isn't even running on the latest version of vbulletin so I don't see them going for vbseo.
I would like to add that If you have money to buy both vBulletin License as well as VBSEO then its getter to get it together and start building link backs with it. You can also decide to add VBSEO latter but as posted by others that you links will be de-indexed and then re-indexed. Hope this helps
i'll have a custom template made based on my blog theme. i think its better to have all of the features out-of-the-box, and for spam, phpbb is more vulnerable than vbulletin i think specifically i can configure akismet with it. that's the problem, i'm saving for the vbulletin+vbseo. thanks for the link, but the demo is in another language, no idea why, how do i change it to english? the thing is i would have the money for vbulletin and maybe for vbseo a little later, so should i wait till i can purchase both or go for vbulletin when i can and add vbseo later?
I think its not, can you name a few websites which was vulnerable. It may be because of the webmaster. but if the admin is careful it can be safe. Phpbb 3.0.3 is safe. Dont worry about safety if safety is your concern dont be phpbb is very safe to use. Very big websites use it. gaiaonline joomla.org why would they use phpbb if its not safe!!
PhpBB is very safe, nothing wrong with and very well developed. Best things are the fantastic support and its free. As for your list, gaiaonline started using phpbb when they first started out almost 6 years ago, it must have been in some really early version. They went away from it and used their own modifications.
what i am worried about phpbb is the seo problem, i tried phpbb and it wasn't indexed after a long time, even though my blog is on the same domain and new posts on my blog gets indexed right away, also the duplication problem with session urls, another thing i need is the infraction system because i know spammers target new forums, so i'll need all the methods to combat it. the thing is right now, i don't have the sufficient funds to start a vB forum, in time i will, but if i start with phpbb for now, later on ill be having trouble with indexing.