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

wonder why digital point doesn't use vBSEO for the forum? If you look at vBSEO there is a testimonial from Digital Point but the forum doesn't use the mod.

 

For a long time, indeed up until the latest release of vBSEO 3.1 in December, they used encryption which reportedly was causing some lag and CPU usage on big boards unless you have awesome hardware I think - that might be the key reason.

Also, in my experience, the default vBulletin archive is pretty good for SEO purposes (though Joe Ward will disagree with me ), I think you don't NEED vBSEO in order to get your site fully indexed, vBulletin is OK out of the box.

However, that said, I do love vBSEO, I use it on both of my vBulletin boards and believe it does provide significant benefit.

best,
Eric

 

Good observation mate,

Even I had a question, i am webmaster for MBA ONLINE

Now the site has got indexed in google fairly but I have been suggesting vbseo to the owner.

The downside is that the owner thinks it will reduce his adsense earnings from archive once this is implemented. server cpu usage issue might be another issue.

can someone shed light on it? and is the reason for not using vbseo on DP the same?

 

i had a feeling it had to do with creating more load on the server. does vBSEO use mod_rewrite to make SE friendly url's? and i'm not to sure what you mean by it used encryption. the thing about vBSEO is the site doesn't list the features of the mod, or am i just missing the features page when looking at their site?

 

We would expect vBSEO to provide a dramatically beneficial experience for DigitalPoint. Since we expect %-age improvements for all forums that install, even a small %-age improvement turns out to be a lot of traffic and ad revenue for large forums! Some sites that are doing well may tend to stick to what they are doing. We do not anticipate DP installing any time in the near future, but we're pretty confident they would quickly become our biggest success story ever.

We certainly do not endorse the vBulletin archive pages as adequate for SEO purposes. Thousands of vBSEO-enabled forum webmasters well tell you the same. Relying on the archive reduces crawling efficiency and potential delivers traffic to pages that will have a high bounce rate. You not only need to get traffic - you need it to stick. vBSEO endeavors to do both:

Powerful SEO that delivers more traffic directly to your optimized forum pages which should be far more "sticky" than plain Jane, bouncy archive pages.

Re: MBA Online

Based on your stats, what %-age of your current visiting traffic is to archive pages vs. normal pages?

 

2000 : 30,000 ( archive : normal ) .. though the ctr on adsense is higher on archive and pays equivalent or sometimes more than the normal pages.

A.) Assuming that MBA is a high paying keyword, will vbseo be of any use there,

B.) On vbseo.com a lot of people who implemented it have commented that their indexed pages has decreased. How would this benefit SEO

C.) Disabling archive would have negative repercussions on adsense earnings ?

 

dp does not need vbseo. it also has good serp and good indexed pages

 

Worst | Very Bad | Bad | Neutral | Good | Very Good | Best

In "optimization" we seek for "optimal" or "best".

Depending on each individual forum there can be a *very big* difference between the search traffic and ad revenue that you achieve between just begin "good" and being "best".

 

Re: MBA keyword

vBSEO focuses on optimizing on a page by page basis, making each thread and forum page optimized for the keywords that it contains. This is called long tail search optimization, and the goal is to harness thousands of web visitors from thousands of different terms, rather than focusing on an individual term.

However, terms like MBA and others important to your niche will naturally occur more frequently within your content, forum titles and descriptions, and posts, etc. So these terms also benefit from long tail optimization when they occur in combination with other terms, etc.

Overall, on your site your highest frequency niche terms will be optimized. The search engines will be able to determine keywords that occur most frequency *site wide*. HOWEVER, we certainly advocate that you identify a large # of niche terms for your site, determine which of them you are most likely to be able to compete for, and then start doing other types of optimization such as:

- Creating particular content focusing directly on those terms, and some related terms.
- Building a 3rd party link campaign to get links into your site, using those terms (in multiple variations) pointing back to you site.

You will find after using vBSEO that there are many ways that vBSEO will automatically help you to optimize for "MBA" and other important terms for your niche.

Re: Decreased indexed pages

You will see reports that vBSEO causes indexed pages to drop when you install. This is correct, but this is good. vBSEO establishes total link consensus for your forum, maximizing link value.

Basically all duplicate content/duplicate path pages, plus all noises pages, and anything redundant or unneeded will be blocked from getting to the search engines and/or eliminated at the source.

So, we expect these pages to fall out of the indexed page count. This is a good thing. Remember - just because they are included in the index page count, does not mean they are delivering traffic. But it certainly does mean that they are hurting your link value, and reducing crawling efficiency for your forum.

vBSEO will *increase* the indexed page count for valuable content pages. It will *reduce* noise/garbage/duplicate pages. It will dramatically boost search engine crawling efficiency.

What's the result of improved crawling efficiency and greater link value (link consensus)?

Faster indexing/updating of all of your content, better chance at ranking for thousands of long tail search terms, reduced bandwidth/server overhead from hungry bots, and ultimately growth in traffic and revenue.

Re: AdSense Earnings from Archive Pages

Let's establish some starting data:

You stated that your ratio of archived to normal (non-archive) page traffic is 2,000 : 30,000 or 1 in 15.

You also stated that AdSense revenue is about 50% from archive pages, and 50% from normal pages.

This tells me two things:

1. You get more traffic from your main content pages (not the archive)
2. But - your archive pages are about 15 times more efficient at generating click throughs.

The implications of this are:

1. Optimizing your main pages and removing your archive pages over the long time is going to increase your traffic significantly. Right now, your archive pages deliver about 7% of your search traffic. We would anticipate that improving your search engine friendliness will boost your traffic in a positive direction by more than 7% especially over the long term.

2. If you remove your archive pages, in the short term, you are most likely going to see decreased earnings. This is due to a few factors:

a) Your archive pages are not *user friendly*. They want to leave these pages as quickly as they arrive. 15 times more often then on your main forum. The result is: less stickiness, fewer registrations, few new content contributions (user posting activity).

If content is what drives your traffic, but your not getting the new members to create that content, your are going to see slower growth in traffic, correct?

So - these pages are paying revenue at a higher rate in the short term, but reducing your long terms growth and success.

b) Your main pages are not as "ad friendly". Visitors are there, but they're not clicking through. This is good in a way and bad in another:

i. If the reduced ad clicks is because users are converting and posting rather than clicking the ads and leaving (never to return), this is a good long term growth strategy for your forum (including revenue).

ii. If the reduced ad clicks is because users do not find the ads targeted or are not compelled because the ad placement is not optimized, this is a bad thing.

You want to convert guests to members and active posting users. But when someone who would click an ad arrives, you want to take advantage of that.

Recommendations:

The revenue is of concern to you, and vBSEO will permit this.

For the time being you should install vBSEO, but keep the standard vBulletin archive settings in place.

This will let you harness much of the advantages vBSEO provides, but will allow the archive pages to co-exist to maintain that revenue stream.

Not only that, but we can expect to see improved ad revenue immediately using vBSEO's AdSense targeting feature in combination with features such as our Relevant Replacements, and some other tweaks that we can help you with if you purchase and submit your site for critique.

So - this takes you to an improved SEO status, with likely elevated traffic and ad revenue, without losing your archive pages.

Now stage II, is to begin working on improving your main forum pages to ensure that they are optimized for the user experience, to help boost conversions, promote posting activity, and encourage ad clicks where appropriate.

This will involve optimizing your ad placement, but also optimizing your pages to ensure that they are lightweight and user friendly, and friendly to the AdSense crawler bot as well (which will determine the relevancy of the ads placed on your site).

Our goal will be to boost the ratio of ad revenue earned on the main forum pages vs. the archive pages. Once this is boosted and the archive pages are delivering a much lower portion of total revenue, we can look at the possibility of disabling the archive permanently and focusing all traffic on your main forum content pages.

How does that sound?

Action Items:

- Install vBSEO (leave archive enabled)
- Implement recommended tweaks by vBSEO Team
- Work on ad placement strategies
- Measure results of changes in template/ad placement optimization, and consider disabling archive when main pages start delivering better revenue levels compared with archive pages.

 

One word... "AMAZING"

I'll install it today itself, lets track the results on the same thread if thats not a problem for DP or maybe you can recommend another url as per your convenience . Do-able ?

 

Is there a page somewhere on the vBSEO site that lists all the features for the mod? I have looked but can't find it, and maybe I'm just missing it.

 

on
http://www.vbseo.com/
you should see an "about vbseo" tab
might try that, or the vbseo demo
http://www.vbseo.com/demo

cheers

 

pm the admins

 

You can track it here or our forums, whichever you prefer. I check in a DP quite frequently.

 

Installed

How do you suggest we start tracking the performance?

I installed it last to last night and somehow the archive was activated which did eat into my revenue.

Though have disabled vbseo for archive tonight

How do you suggest we begin ?

 

You can change your vBSEO archive settings to allow it to act like vBulletin's normal achieve in your vBSEO control panel:

Common methods of tracking include tracking the # of indexed pages included at Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

However, I advocate tracking the key metric which is # of hits from search engines over time.

Another great factor to watch is the "# of keywords that are delivering traffic". Since we optimized on a thread by thread basis (long tail search optimization), we expect the # of different terms that send you traffic to grow. This is another great way to see your vBSEO enabled growth.

Check out this post regarding how to make good use of the Google Webmaster Control Panel:
http://www.vbseo.com/f2/google-webmaster-tools-recommended-all-vbseo-customers-21230/

PS One advantage we rarely talk about is how rewritten URLs give us a better sense of what to expect at a link before we actually click through. See the above. Much more expressive and in many cases more compelling since the title is clearly indicated (partially, and fully with link scroll over).

 

173000

indexed pages in google

Pages (355,000) in yahoo

138 in MSN.

Ranked well for "MBA online" BMS etc.

 

why would they need it? Digitalpoint has a kajillion top SERPs already

It seems like any internet marketing thing you search for results in Digitalpoint being in the top 5.

 

No one questions if DP is a successful forum or not. It certainly is.

However, it does seem a little silly to suggest that you can "be successful enough".

Would you stop at the gas station and put only $5 in because that's how much it will cost to get to the mall and back, or would you fill up the tank to get the extra mileage?

If I offered to give you $100/$200/$500 a day, would you say $100 is fine. That's all I need. Or would you "maximize" your potential earnings?

 

Hellow jward,

As per your suggestions, you see, I have already installed vbseo.

Could I get your suggestions on the rest of the things?

The main idea of installing vbseo is ofcourse to grow the community and more importantly to increase the bottomline ( revenue )