Is there a reason Digital Point doesn't use vBSEO??

jward, I will have to disagree with some stuff and i will explain why.

You use recurrently the valid argument that visitors that reach a vbulletin archive page is not good if you want visitors to come back to your site and eventually register. That's true, nothing wrong with that. But then you fail to inform that ads in your actual page also keep a lot of users away. A lot of users won't register if they see a site full of ads all over all the time. You might say that you can remove the ads for registered users, but we both know that a lot of visitors will first become regular READERS then register after a while. Which means that ads in actual forum pages actually decrease the sign up ratio.

But more important than that... by using such strategies as aiming for more registrations you are relying too much on variables that depend on the nature of the forum and that's exactly what seo is NOT about. At least if you have a commercial product that should give some warranty that it will work efficiently you should target strictly technical issues and mitigate them efficiently. A product like vbseo should, in my opinion, increase the SE friendliness of your site rather than fixing 'schemes' to recruit users.

Regular users don't click ads. Simple as that. That being said it doesn't really mater that much the page where the users land from google, your ad clicks will come from the users that visit your page once and then leave. So, it does not really mater what page they get into. A simplified page like vbulletin archive pages won't stop the users that produce juicy content from register.

But there is THE heavy reason why vbulletin archive pages rank damn well. Something that leaves vbseo left without so much to live for... We both know what it is, but i am afraid it's a huge taboo among vbseo community. Let's do something then. In order to prove everybody here that vbseo is indeed more efficient than vbulletin archive, I let you tell everybody what is that thing that i am talking about and then you can explain how and why, in your point of view, that doesn't matter that much.
If not i reveal it in the next post, if no other user do it before.
Just a hint:
Everybody talks about 'nofollow', sure search engines obey it, but, do they totally ignore the outgoing link when it comes to build the page reputation? I honestly doubt that, not to say that i don't believe in it.

don't get me wrong, I am not trying to say vbseo is useless, but i do think it is overrated and if i am not wrong it's older than vbulletin archive, which basically leaves it without a bulletproof prove that it is in fact still necessary, because it succeeded before vb archive arrived. But i am not sure about this.

I use open source alternatives though, they are not at all as efficient when it comes to seo as the commercial ones, but with some tweaking one can get really cool results.

jward, please let me know if I said anything wrong and how is that wrong.

I think digital point does not need vbseo.
1. Because the administration might have understood that vbseo does not necessarily improves results in all cases
2.Because they are already top ranked.
Non-seo ranking factors are way more important. There is many incoming links and much relevant content, I think that ranks this website so high that SEO is not necessary.

 

THE question would be, what vBSEO can do for the high CPU usage?

 

If your server is already near its capacity, then vBSEO could increase the load.

If your server is well within its limitations, then vBSEO not result in a degradation in your performance.

We have thousands of customers. Very few have ever requested a refund due to performance.

BTW - If you are running a forum without vBSEO, and it's near the servers capacity, it's still in your best interest to upgrade!

 

Unfortunately, this is an extreme flaw in logic to suggest.

Are you really suggesting that if you are successful, you are not interested in more traffic, more revenue?

FYI Some of the most profound jumps in traffic and revenue from our customers occurred for forums that were already successful. Think about it:

2 x 1,000 hits = 2,000 (good)
2 x 500,000 hits = 1,000,000 (amazing)

I don't think anyone would say that 500,000 is good enough for them if they could have 1,000,000 instead. But that's basically what you are suggesting.

Maybe you haven't seen this:
http://www.vbseo.com/f55/1400-one-day-vbseo-18151/

As for cloak and dagger stuff, vB archive *taboos*, etc, I'll leave that discussion for another day, after we have reconciled the flaw in your logic.

 

You can always do better in anything in life... SEO is just the same. Bottom line I don't think Shawn cares and doesn't feel like running it on something of this magnitude in case something did mess up... Simple as that

 

I just think the admins doesn't really care anymore..!

 

First the most important stuff. I should make clear that i don't want to start a fight nor creating an hostile discussion in here. Please don't misunderstand me to the point of considering that i am criticizing vbseo strategy or business model?
This is a strictly technical discussion.

I am afraid you are the one that is falling into a logic flaw by misinterpreting what i just said.

I can't see how you can look at what i said and take the conclusion that i am suggesting that being successful is enough reason to not worry about more success, traffic, revenue, etc.
What i said was:
if you have a site with very high search engine reputation due to it's content relevance/amount and age, seo becomes less relevant. This is because content comes in first place.
When we're talking about top sites this becomes more evident.
Put yourself in google's shoes, would you scarify relevance of the results in favor to site SEF?
Sure google tries to shape the web so it's conveniently indexed, that's where SEO comes in, but relevance in their results is the main reason why their so successful.

But even assuming that I am totally wrong, those numbers you showed are actually not so "amazing". If you analyze the (popularity rank,traffic) curve you'll notice that it is in fact a logarithmic curve, therefore a linear increase of traffic, which is what you're suggesting, is not so impressive as it might look on the surface.
Also, when you say... "sites that were already successful" I think you should say "sites that were already big".
It sounds similar but it's quite different. We have absolutely no reference to how much did they invest in their content. Probably they were not so satisfied with their search engine reputation, that's why they hired you guys to do your job. Which you naturally did and achieved some results.

I've seen that testimonial and I read many other stuff in vbseo site before, in fact I am discussing with you here using some knowledge that i got for example by reading articles that you posted yourself in vbseo.com


If we are ready to get into the discussion about 'cloaking' I would like to start by saying that i found the use of the word 'cloaking' unfair in this case as it is too negative.

 

Understood.

IF a site were highly optimized, no additional SEO would be required in theory. However, a top performing site does NOT mean that it is highly optimized.

There are obviously other factors that lead to success. As you noted, content is one of those vital factors. But that does not mean SEO should be left unattended to.

Therefore, a "top site" does not make "SEO less relevant". Consider again:
http://www.vbseo.com/f55/1400-one-day-vbseo-18151/

This was a "top site" before vBSEO. After vBSEO it was profoundly more successful.

Google does favor SEF (search engine friendly) sites. SEF sites "help Google determine relevance". Consider:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

They are telling you how to make your site more search engine friendly.

Would you really reject (or dismiss as insignificant) a linear increase in traffic and equivalent revenue? $1000 vs. $2000?

Wouldn't you consider this site "successful" before vBSEO?
http://www.vbseo.com/f55/1400-one-day-vbseo-18151/

I did not mean to confuse you by saying "Cloak and dagger". I did not mean blackhat cloaking. I was referring to:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cloak+and+dagger (A big secret or conspiracy theory).

My reference was to when you said there was something taboo nobody has revealed.

Any site, of varying levels of size and success, will benefit from improved SEO.

 

Well...I guess we look at traffic optimization in a different way.

Indeed, I was in fact referring to non optimized sites. The question here is, would a site with bad SE friendliness but with an extremely high SE reputation get a big benefit from being optimized? Personally i don't think the benefit is that big if the site is already the biggest dog in the fight.
I believe thats the case of DP.

The taboo i was refering to is this one:
Vbulletin archive has very clean and valid html, does not lays its data on tables and, the most important: removes all the external links
This is something you can never do with vbseo, unless you don't mind not providing clickable links in the users messages, which would be really annoying.
Some people might say nofollow, but are we so sure that a link with nofollow is totally ignored when google computes a page's reputation? Sure those links are not followed for further indexing, but i wouldn't say they're ignored for other purposes.
I think you guys at vbseo are aware of this, as far as i know vbseo does not ad nofollow to user posted links.

No offense, the reason why i think this is a bit of a taboo it's because in your article about vbulletin archive, everything makes sense and is clearly shown, exept this little detail that is very important IMHO.

 

Hello jward

Could i get a reply on it please?
im seeing a 30 % downside on the revenue after implementation of vbseo though

 

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