Let me get this done with the second sentence. No. But is it a good product? Yes, it's just not worth the outrageous price for it. Consider this, if you don't eat an extra happy meal, you'll have enough money to buy a basic license to vBulletin. Having said that, vBulletin and VBSeo are nowhere near the punch per punny, no where close. vBulletin is an amazing product, secure, has an active tech support team, and a vibrant community. VBSeo on the otherhand is a smaller company, while their resources are obviously more limited their community is smaller, and in the end it seems that it's the same 2-3 people who deal with all the support complains. So did I buy it? Why yes. Was it beneficial to me and my forum? Sure. As of a month from purchase I have 77,300 pages indexed on my forum which has 12 000 threads, and we'll assume an average of a 7 page thread. So that'd be about 84 000 pages there that's just thread content, throw in member pages and we have about 100 000 pages to be indexed. That's a very good percentage, but I'm guessing the actual possible number of pages to be indexed is nearing 200 000 - 300 000. my site itself is about....6 months old now, i switched about 1 month ago. However one thing I did notice while looking at the sites they had as examples, they weren't exactly...active forums, and google had indexed a large percentage of their pages. So before you buy, what they don't tell you you NEED to have ioncube or zen optimizer (or zen compiler or something) installed on you server, otherwise it will not work. this was a huge pain in the ass and would've probably been a deterrent had I know. but i had spent my money and i just got the feeling they weren't going to offer me a refund. the system IS easy to use, a bit of it is confusing, in regards to what the rewritten URLs should look like, but the default is usually good. marketing "promises" i noticed on the forums where things like, woah! google visitors increased by 10 after the rewrties - nope, i didn't see it. my adsense earnings went up! - nope, mine actually went down and traffic's been going up my adsense ads are more targetted! - nope, not at all. same as before. i'm guessing this is caused by either a placebo effect, or by the time you start noticing, google has indexed the page already and therefore is providing more targetted ads. i got indexed quicker - who's to say? i do have 77 000 indexed which is a great number, and i had about 22 000 at the 5 mark point, so i do believe it was an aide. my pr went up - nope, it's been the same. but it has only been 1 month so i'm sure if there was a change i wouldn't notice for another 3-4 months. more people are registering - nope. registration rates were the same for the entire time throughout, until that two weeks ago when i redesigned the forum visually - then memberships joins up raised. so was it worth it? to me? not at all. if i had known before purchasing that i needed to install ioncude. well i would've just paid nintento the 3 cookies and crumbs to write me up a mod_rewrite. because that's all that this is. sure there's a system, but it's olfactory nonsense, of course they're going to tell you that each individual piece is going to make your forum amazing, but it won't. your forum is as good as it is. doesn't matter how many times you polish a turd. the good thing about vbseo is that yes, it is a paid product, and they've done it before, and they know what they're doing. the pages redirect, and it does have some failsafes, such as http://www.gossiprocks.com/forum/laughs-oddities/11994-how-shower.html http://www.gossiprocks.com/forum/laughs-oddities/11994-how-to-shower.html point to the same URL, even though it has extra words. it's impressive, but easily achievable by code. so if you got the extra money and like the URL format, beleive it will help your site. go ahead and buy it. but if you just got vbulletin, have 10 members and 100 posts and believe that this will be the viagra to get your windsock of a forum erect - take a pass.
So it creates duplicate pages then? Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content. taken from the google guidelines page.
I can see now that the second link is 301 redirected to the first one, which is OK 1 Server Response: http://www.gossiprocks.com/forum/laughs-oddities/11994-how-to-shower.html HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 02:34:54 GMT Server: Apache X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.2 Set-Cookie: bblastactivity=0; expires=Sun, 04 Mar 2007 02:34:54 GMT; path=/forum/; domain=.gossiprocks.com Cache-Control: private Pragma: private Location: http://www.gossiprocks.com/forum/laughs-oddities/11994-how-shower.html Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Redirect Target: http://www.gossiprocks.com/forum/laughs-oddities/11994-how-shower.html #2 Server Response: http://www.gossiprocks.com/forum/laughs-oddities/11994-how-shower.html HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 02:34:55 GMT Server: Apache X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.2 Set-Cookie: bblastactivity=0; expires=Sun, 04 Mar 2007 02:34:55 GMT; path=/forum/; domain=.gossiprocks.com Cache-Control: private Pragma: private Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
I am using vbrewrite and it works great. Had a couple snags that I had to untangle but all in all it is working great.
I could say the same thing for VB itself over other free solutions. Why pay $xxx for something you can get free and it be just as good (or near enough)? SMF Mybb Punbb even PHPBB Take your pic.
IMO It is very controversal and already discussed various times in many forums. Recent Example. V7n is using vbseo and DP is not using it. It depends on you
yeah, but those suck in comparison. and how much would it cost to get your own custom coded message board? thousands of dollars. whereas a mod rewrite? probably 50-100 bucks.
And which of those have you actually tried to use that you can say they suck? SMF and Mybb are both imho very similar to VB.. A forum software is about features...what features does VB have that others do not? What do I get with VB that I can't get for free? VB is imho for noob admins and site owners that simply don't want to deal with any coding, installing, upgrading, or modifying...all of which are FREE things you can do yourself with other forum solutions. It's like painting your house...sure you can do it yourself over a weekend but most people tend to pay "pros" to do it. That's simply out of laziness not skill or features. Painting is easy and difficult to really mess up. Also from a bystander viewpoint the end result will look the same. My analogy imho is on the money when it comes to VB vs other Forums. VB is the "pros" solution for the lazy. Nothing wrong with that imho...Just that your discussion on the VBSEO is so near my opinion of VB itself...As stated..there are free mod_rewrite solutions for VB and I am sure it's not impossible to do one yourself over a weekend if you desire.
But there are other reasons people use vB which cannot be matched by your free solutions: Professional support from people who are paid to provide first class support. Regular updates and extremely quick security patching, as they have a reputation to maintain. Stellar hacking community unmatched (other than phpBB, which is past its prime) in terms of sheer variety, functionality, and quality of mods available. A diverse array of top notch premium programs with which to integrate it exist. It conveys a much more professional appearance than free software like phpBB. Its more SEO friendly out of the box.
I knew support would be brought up but not every webmaster needs support. I rarely have to ask for assistance from actual forum developers. I see more VB questions in most forums..I wonder why if VB support is so great..hmm... Updates on most forums software that concern security happen within 48 hours. The hacking community for most forum software is the nuts and bolts of a good choice. SMF and PHPBB both have extensive hacks for FREE. Unlike VB hacks which many are charging for such as VBSEO which the OP agrees on the matter. I am not sure about the "top notch premium programs"...could you give me an example? As far as I know most CMS's don't even support VB since it's not GNU. The professional appearance argument imho is true over phpbb and any default install of a forums. I am actually considering making an exact VB clone for phpbb just to prove to people that appearances can be deceiving. Check out mybboard.org as I think it could easily fool most people that it's VB. Don't forget the #1 forums on the web is NOT VB...nor is the second..or third..you have to go the 6th to see VB. It might be more SEO friendly than say...phpbb but it's not true that VB is more SEO than all free forum solutions. Heck the fact that VBseo exists proves that. If VB was so great SEO out of the box why would anyone need to pay another $200 for seo solution for it?
Support posts elsewhere don't mean they have bad support. It merely means that people consult mutliple sources, or in some cases, stopped paying for support because they found other webmasters could help them. I agree with you in that I never have used the vbulletin support forums, bug tracker, or ticket system because I know the software well enough to fix my own mistakes. But some people don't, so its a plus for them. As to your security time, I'd question that, though if it were the case, there remains two important points: 1) vB does it in less than 48 hours. 2) vBulletin is obligated to patch holes. phpBB and SMF are not. Now, as to the hacks, SMF has a decent sized community there, but its nothing next to vB. And while phpBB may have a sprawling selection, many are required for even base functionality. And so many are out of date and have been long abandoned by their authors, so are of no value. Conversely, vBulletin has a huge selection of excellent hacks and a very attractive growth rate therein. Plus, its actual plug-in system makes hacking so much easier than phpbb. Examples of top notch premium programs which integrate would be like vBAuction and GARS. My site has three premium scripts installed as of now: GAB, GAL, and GARS. Soon we'll be installing Geekmart and vBa Links Directory too. Down the road, finances permitting, we'll probably pick up vBSEO, and possibly invest in better gallery software (Photopost Pro). Now, I know appearances can be decieving. Its easy to tell within a second or two if somebody is using vB or a rip of it. And the software will show a user the difference anyways. Now, as to the stats number, I think you're looking at the wrong stats. What is the most popular Big-Boards software? vB by a huge margin. That said, looking at your number, recognize that of the 5 largest boards which don't use vB, 4 use custom scripts, and one uses a version of phpBB which is the result of over 10,000 hours of custom coding between the founders, phpBB staff, ect. First off, vBSEO is $149, not $200, which actually makes a fairly big difference. But your arguement is crap here. It is better out of the box than any free solution. But if you want the competitive edge against other premium board and against already established board that use free systems, vBSEO is designed to make the difference. Its kind of like the concept behind premium gallery software. Sure, you could slap up Coppermine. But if you want to look better than the rest, you run Photopost Pro. Similarly, if you want decent SEO, you can just install vB. But if you want even better SEO, you buy vBSEO.
You mention phpbb too much. Have you actually tried SMF or even mybb? MyBB has hooks for plugins and mods as well..so does punbb which I personally tried with excellent success. I know VB has many strongpoints...but it has weaknesses which few care to recognize. Most Vb sites look too similar imho. Also I think VB is bloated in coding...have you seen the file sizes for the functions!!! Good grief charlie brown! I think it's only easy for someone to spot a VB lookalike if they are a webmaster. Most don't really care. I know at my phpbb sites that the members hardly notice, comment, or care what forum software I use. This site of course is a bunch of webmasters hence their preference for VB which most likely they personally use. Hey I like VB sites just fine...but I have no problem with others too. If this site was SMF, phpbb, or MyBB then I would most likely still use it. I really challenge you to look at MyBB...it's VERY close to VB in many respects. I still don't see how my arguement that VB is not the best SEO out of the box...you say it's crap but give no reason why. You say it's the best...but NOPE...not true...and VBSEO proves that. Also gogaia isn't 10,000 hours of hacking and modding...he posted many of his changes in the phpbb forums and it's only a few hours at best. Anyways here are a couple good mybb examples. http://mybb1.sshillet.mybbhosting.com/forum.php (very similar VB look) http://www.webdevote.com/ (not mine) http://www.democracyforums.com (my site) http://forums.wsdeluxe.com/ (plain but nice)
Yes, I have tried MyBB, SMF, and PunBB, though not in production environments, because they don't really cut the mustard. You say that most vB sites look similar. That is true to the extent that most phpBB boards or most myBB boards look the same. Obviously forums running a default theme and lacking mods look similar. But as with any software, you can customize it. As to code being bloated, I suppose that's relative. I've got no issue with it, since I find its base code to be insufficient for my needs as it is, hence my love of its modification community. Once again, you're mistaken about SEO. vB is the best out of the box. But vBSEO helps to enhance it further. Its like adding spinners to an Escalade. And you're wrong about Gaia. A few quotes from the creator: "It’s a vicious cycle of sleep (occasionally on the floor), eat, and 16 hours of development. ^_^; As this is the first year of development, I’m giving it all I’ve got, so I now found myself glued to my chair, either coding, maintaining or researching for the community." "At the same time, I’ve founded many businesses before and none had the level of involvement, work load, and stress that Gaia had brought me. Gaia had probably shortened my lifespan for a few years. ^_^"
WHY do you believe it's the best SEO out of the box? What about it makes this true? You can't just say it without any backup. I don't see any out-of-the-box features I can't get in other forums. As for gaia...I am sure most of his development is load balancing and such...I am pretty sure he doesn't change that much of the phpbb code anymore. Nice quotes though anyways. We should all wish to have his problem.
I believe that one of the reason vbseo is being bought are cosmetic reasons. I've seen forum owners comment things like "look, how much better my urls look now". I do believe it makes a difference in msn rankings. In other search engines, I'm not quite sure.