That's a good point. I've seen MANY forums get high rankings through vB's and IPB's archiving system which puts threads in very simple layout/view but makes everything SEO.
Just another mention of how gprime has commented how VB is the best out-of-the-box SEO.. well I just launched democracyforums.com this week... I already have 540 pages at google 27 pages at Yahoo 88 pages at msn So I am not sure how VB is any better than free software like mybb.
The vBSEO community is actually reletively extremely active, there is a large support staff who tend to answer every single query, including those thousands of support tickets with other members cannot view. I didn't realise that having a dedicated team of staff to answer support complaints and troubleshooting issues was a bad thing, there are around 6/7 staff members on the vBSEO Total Support Team. One deals with german based problems, there are 3 who deal with support tickets, and then 2/3 who deal with the actual vBSEO code and implementing the new features constantly suggested and requested by the vBSEO Support forum members. Actually the vBSEO Support Staff are usually more than willing to refund customers unhappy with their purchase, especially since you feel you where not fully aware of the requirements behind vBSEO. However on the vBSEO Purchase page which you view before buying it clearly states; It is absolutely impossible to predict the impact that vBSEO will have on your forums upon installation, and vBSEO will never "promise" any of the things you have mentioned, they are merely aspects of which vBSEO is capable of. woah! google visitors increased by 10 after the rewrties - nope, i didn't see it. If the only reason behind you being dissastified with your purchase was because of the technical requirements behind the product then surely it would have been more supportive, appropriate and conductive to actually discuss this with the vBSEO Support team themselves, or just open a support ticket. Rather than galloping off to the nearest webmaster forum, and essentially slating vBSEO because "you were sure you weren't going to get a refund", and unhappy at how vBSEO did not work as intended. I am going to make another repost of a list i have been posting in other vBSEO related threads, whereby users seem to be confused with what exactly vBSEO is offering customers. Yes, you are getting a URL rewrite system, which turns irrelevant, unfriendly dynamic URLs into contextually relevant URLs but vBSEO also has a multitude of alternate features and additions which are all fully supported and intergrated into the final product; 1. Custom Rewrite Rules 2. Trackbacks and Pingbacks 3. Relevant Replacements 4. Code Compression 5. "Height" and "Width" Insertion 6. Google Adsense Targetting 7. Meta Keyword and Description Optimization 8. "Previous / Next Thread" Optimization 9. Post External / Internal Links Optimization 10. Acroynm Expansion 11. PR Consolidation 12. Automatical rel="nofollow" insertion 13. Footer Archive Links Features such as trackbacks and pingbacks are reinventing the way forums themselves are supposed to function. By being able to send and receive trackbacks, vBSEO enabled forums are essentially ensuring that they are increasing the relevancy of their trackbacked link exchanges with blogs and other vBSEO enabled forums.
in my opinion vbSEo is a great sum of free SEO tips and mods. in one hack it is just this you can do what vbseo do freely but with a lot of work