VB SEO Updated opinions please?

Hi folks,

I did a quick search for VBSEO before posting and was surprised to find only one (useful) entry dating from 2006?

I run 4 or 5 VB forums here in Ireland with PRs of 4 and average traffic 10 to 15 K UVs/ per month.

I'm thinking about purchasing VBSEO to trial on one of the forums.

Any one like to share advice or personal experience please?

Any risks?

Kind regards,

Stuart

 

I just purchased it Saturday for my forum that has over 1,000,000 posts and about 10,000 registered users. I don't have a lot of concrete data for you yet but I'd be happy to update you and let you know traffic-wise how it works out for me.

The advice I will give you is make sure you take the time to completely go through and read the optimization guide that they have on there, because if it's not done currectly it will increase the load on your server and potentially slow it down to a standstill (which happened to me on a peak time). That was my fault, because I went with all the default settings which was a bad idea.

You want to make sure you include the [forum_id] along with the [thread_id] in the custom URL fields, because it reduces the amount of "thinking" the server has to do when it attempts to open threads from the rewritten URL. So install it on a test forum on your server to tweak all your settings, then put those same settings into your main forum once you have all the kinks worked out.

But I'm looking forward to seeing how the results work out and would be happy to keep you updated. Just PM me to remind me

Ian

 

Cheers Ian,

One of my PR 4 Forums is actually a "sand box" forum which I might buy a license for in order to test and evaluate VBSEO. If it works, the sand box (irelandandirish.com) may become a live site !

Many thanks for the feedback.

I'll post again here and PM you in a few weeks to remind you about an update !

Kind regards,

Stuart

 

Sounds good. Let me know if you need any customization advice.

Also, make sure you have an Analytics account with Google and you enable it when you install it. It's a good way to track if there's been an increase in your site being spidered by the search engines. Plus it allows you to really analyze your site even further and see trends, etc.

 

Cheers Ian,

Apologies for the belated thanks.... ( away on business for a week).

Keep in touch on here with the VB SEO experience !

Kind regards,

Stuart

 

I think there's a vbulletin plugin to install google analytics. Just a tip

I'm looking forward to reading about your experiences with vbseo, I'm interested in buying it myself.

 

Hi all,

Well, I bit the bullet and made the purchase of VBSEO. I installed it on an Irish Boating site www.powerboat.ie , that I own.

It took a few days to get the Professional Installation by VBSEO completed even though I had supplied all of the correct usernames and passwords and all of the required pre install stuff was in order. I had a similar experience when I paid for a pro-install on VB Photopost classifieds a few months ago.

In both cases the installers stopped installation because our server was missing x or y. In both cases, they were in fact present and ready ! However all was fixed up eventually !

VBSEO allow you to enter your google analytics account number and it then processes the entire forum. It will take a few weeks to build up data.

I'm qute impressed too with the rewrite of URLs to reflect the title of the thread.

Something else of interest is the feature that allows you to make all links in the forums as "No Follow" Links. This means that while the links are visible active and working, the search engine spiders are blocked from following them. They therefore don't consider them as outgoing links from your site. This may be good as outgoing links may sap your Google PR to some extent.

Again, it will take a few weeks or more to see if there is any improvement in site traffic.

The install comes at a good time as Google reassessed www.powerboat.ie as a PR 4 last Saturday (Up 1 !)

I'll keep you all in touch !

Stuart

 

Cool, thanks for the input and keep us updated on the progress!

 

Keep us updated on the success of your forum

 

Sorry for this newbie question but can you explain what a PR4 is? Also what changes have you observed since running VBSEO?

Thanks,

 

PR stands for pagerank, it's the value of your website according to Google. You can check yours at digpagerank.com. The higher the value, the better it is.

 

I bought vBSEO for my forums even the new ones because I like the features it provides.