OMG thank you sooooo much for this info, i love this! I'm going to install vbseo right now! :O Thank you so much again, god , i don't know what I would of done without your help!
Extended the offer by 30 minutes so that all the members on a forum who view on their own time can have the benefit of that valuable extra time? Isn't that thoughtful. What's next, a cheesy infomercial featuring Dom LePree? I haven't jumped on the hate bandwagon here at all but your offer that just expired didn't exactly do wonders for credibility of your claims. There are pros and cons of SEO or we wouldn't be doing it with other items, e.g. CMS like Wordpress, Joomla, etc. But how much extra it does for vbulletin, I really don't know. There are dangers. I've had links in Google and yahoo for many years on some of my sites and I've read that you loose them once you install vbseo and it can take 1 month or greater to get them back -- *if* you get them back with that many and at the same ranking. I don't know. Maybe I'd risk that even for $150, but... There is the concern about needing to have VBSEO updated forever since losing it means your URLs will be erased again if you uninstall. Since the code is encoded and there is also no escrow arrangement, should the author decide to take an extended hiatus or sell the company to yet another crappy investor, you are screwed. It has happened before to me which is why I am extremely wary ever using encoded software from a place without options and reliabilty, e.g. Adobe, Microsoft, etc. -- especially scripts that are essential to my site's functionality. So the choice is yours for $150. In most instances I have paid a little to get full source code after I've been approved and sign the appropriate short doc. The value is in the absolute need for constant updating anyways so it's not the typical piracy problem and I do respect that issue.
Just so everyone know I (the thread starter) went and bought vbseo and besides the fact that it took 3 minutes to install (which gave me a mild wood) all the features that I would have chosen myself were turned on by default. The whole blog and ping and trackback URLs brought me to full salute! Thanks vbseo. I'm gonna take a shower....
I'm not sure we can feature your testimonial on our homepage, but... nonetheless, we're happy to hear that you *liked* vBSEO.
I'm glad that after 5 minutes of working with the script, we have someone who has decidedly fallen in love and found the mother of his children. I'm moved, truly. Amicably of course, I'd be interested in hearing here how you respond to my substantive points regarding vbseo and if they have been considered at any point.
Re: Indexed pages Expect your SERP count to change. 301 redirects ensure that the engines find and index the new content in place of the old. Indexed page count should drop at first (which is a good thing) as it purges duplicate content (or content without link authority, i.e. multiple URLs to the same content). Remaining and new static CRU (Content Relevant URLs) are more search engine friendly and completely optimized for link consistency/consensus. Re: Doom's Day Scenarios vBSEO is doing very well. If anyone were to uninstall the script for any reason they might conjure, CRUs can be 301-ed back to the original thread formats with a straightforward configuration in your .htaccess file. A wealth of information & feedback direct from our customers awaits you at our forum if you are interested. They will be forthcoming with information on the great benefits of using vBSEO as well as any issues they encountered.
Can we get a limited time demo of the full version, just to test and compare with vRewrite. Im actually interested if it really improves your search traffic that much. Oh and by the way, can you easily uninstall that program if ever you don't like the results?
I've had two emails ignored by them and as of two months ago (the last I checked) the features list for vbSEO is no where to be found on the vbSEO webpage (though are on Crawlabilities site). IMHO, I'll NOT buy something to SEO my site that does not know enough about SEO to actually list what their product does on their own page... When I first started my forums I looked into vbSEO and wanted to buy it based on the few raves I got from it. I headed over to their page to see what all it did and the only thing I found were a bunch of sales pitches. I tried google's SITE: parameter to find the features and the only thing I found even close was a thread started by a member (who at the time of posting was not staff). I emailed them asking for what all their product had to offer and no one bothered to reply (the other email I sent was unrelated). I also found that the members were FAR more helpful then staff on their forums, though overall I found the entire place to be fairly rude. To me this was a triple negative which turned me off completely to their company and product.
Sorry to hear you had a bad experience. We are working on a full user guide now that vBSEO 3.0 has been released. You might be interested in checking out our demo to explore the vBSEO Control Panel: http://www.vbseo.com/demo/
Nah, I jumped into the forums a while back and found all my answers. The only reason I complain about this is that vBSEO is NOT SEOed and to me that is a big enough selling point to NOT buy it. Search vBSEO.com for a features list, you'll find enough sales pitches to make it look like an MFA site, but no where, and I mean NO WHERE is there a list that says what it does. So when you guys do get that new manual up, put it on the vbSEO site, not Crawlability... it'll be where people are expecting to find it. Also, has vbSEO come forward and placed their annual fees on their use ragreements or terms pages? I recall a thread here someplace about it...and the whole thing made the vBSEO team look a bit lucrative. Bait and Switch by vbSEO Negatives of vBSEO I'd love the product personally, it's the people I can not bring myself to work with. As if you look at the pro's and con's all the pros lay with the product and all the cons lay with the people that produce it. As sad as that is, it's the practices and set up of Crawability that has turned me off from what is likely a FANTASTIC product.
Unfortunately I agree and there are many others (and I know you've heard this before JWard.) The sales pitch is so sleazy ala Dom LePree (and the rest of the late night infomercial kings promising fancy cars, big houses and expensive hookers) that it was difficult for me to consider the product regardless of cost. The latest pitch was... let's just say it was one notch above their "unbranded version auction of limited copies" which really struck me as one of the most unprofessional marketing gimmicks I've ever witnessed. Given that it must be branded and must be encoded were two reasons we could not even consider the software. Our sites are too large to worry about something going wrong and absolutely no way to fix it quickly. We work in three different time zones and someone always monitors our sites. Additionally, we could not (and would not) allow someone to slap their branding on our large sites and get that benefit after we've paid a good amount of money for their product. That said, there are other alternatives, none we've used because we're indexed quite well atm.
Sometimes I drift more towards the middle of the fence whenever VBSEO introduces a new feature and almost consider buying it. I really do think there needs to be a clear list of every little feature. It should be easy to find too. How do I know if i can get something that I can or can't get for free when I can't even see what VBSEO does?
I am going to give the product a shot on a forum I have that dosent have alot of posts yet but is getting good traffic. After reading all the posts on this thread I was unable to come to a conclusion in regards to whether it is worth it. Does VBSEO have an easy uninstall? Could it actually hurt traffic? Can i get a refund if I dont like it?
Un-install is just as easy as installation. You remove the product from your vBulletin Admin CP, remove the .htaccess file, and delete uploaded vBSEO files. If you installed long enough to have your Content Relevant URLs indexed, then you may also want to set-up some reverse .htaccess instructions to direct the CRUs back to your original format. vBSEO relies on safe, whitehat SEO methods to optimize your forum. Refunds are provided only when users are unable to install the product on their server due to incompatibilities, etc, such as a shared hosting account that does not have ionCube/Zend capabilities (a rare but possible situation).
im sure there are a few ppl on DP that ahve vbseo on their forums for at least 2 years, how is it treating u? im on the verge of buying it if VBSEO was smart, theyd give 1 free copy to many forum owners and if they saw results they would uy more. I own 5 vbulletin's and if i got 1 and liked it, i would apply it to all 5