It's okay, Joey. All Toots ever does is repeat stuff he's heard from other people. He's agreeing with you today because he can't remember if he disagreed with it yesterday. Just look at his posts about DMOZ or forum sig links and nofollow...
You're just not paying attention, are you Toots? Since I see clients for anywhere from 5 to 9 hours a day, and actually get out of the house with my kids and my girlfriend whenever I can, I'm hardly hanging out on forums all day, am I. You, on the other hand, have memberships in more forums than I ever knew existed. Interestingly, many of them are still under the name sitetutor, which you should not be using since you were fired by that organization for hanging out on forums all day instead of doing your job. That was actually the reason you changed member names here, wasn't it, Toots? Your capacity for projection is quite astounding.
Lets see. I dont recall Minstrel changing his name ever- this is like your 4th name isnt it toots? Hmmmm -- How many forums have fired you from being a moderator Toots? I mean - besides me?
Certainly. I think the subject was why you are still using the name sitetutor on so many forums when you were fired by sitetutor.com and when you are fully aware that you are no longer associated with them or entitled to use the name.
I like the way the URLS look in a mod_rewrite forums. However I wouldn't pay $150 to get it done..not even sure it's worth $15. I fought with Minstrel on this before...I actually caved in and removed my mod_rewrite on his whole-hearted recommendation. Guess what! I lost thousands of pages in SERPs. I also lost a lot of good positions too. I had at one point 35k pages...now I have 13k. I tried the dynamic URLs for 3-4 months...no good. Now I am back to the seo friendly URLs and traffic is up. There is a lot of attention given to Google but what about MSN and Yahoo? Don't they count? I seen sites with a great #1 position on both of those get great traffic and it wasn't even listed in Google. Minstrel you continue to say that dynamic or mod_rewrite urls don't matter but I just don't agree.
I would like to see what your dynamic URLs looked like, labrocca. What I (and others) have said is that (1) you don't need mod_rewrite, (2) mod_rwwrite intorduces problems of its own, (3) you can accomplish the goal of mod_rewrite by ensuring that the dynamic URLs are spider friendly (no session or tracking IDs, limited number of variables). If you followed (1) and (2) and not (3), I'm not surprised you lost ground.
Did you include somehow in your analysis that changing urls in anyway will drop them initially from the index? Then re-indexing may expose the "new pages" to all sorts of factors. You probably covered all that somewhere before... I'll search.
Making a massive change to your website descriptions, urls, etc can cause google to quickly deindex the site for a period of time. This obviously doesnt matter if your site isnt well indexed in the first place. I goofed when I upgraded a forum of mine to 3.5 and didnt replace all of my SEO hacks right away - My pages dropped from over 100k to under 10k. They are coming back now, but thats what happens when your inconsistant with Google. You get in some sort of temporary sandbox it would seem.
That doesn't really answer my questions, though. First, two months may not be long enough to re-index your whole site (and you originally said "I tried the dynamic URLs for 3-4 months; was it 2, 3-4, or what exactly?), and remember you were changing URLs so that's what you were asking SEs to do. You also said, "I had at one point 35k pages...now I have 13k" - if in two months you were able to get 13K dynamic URLs indexed, that's not bad at all for new or re-indexing. Second, I asked what your dynamic URLs looked like. Did you remove session IDs for guests and any other tracking variables? If not, the problem is not dynamic vs. static URLs but rather improper dynamic URL form.
If you look at foums like this one, like vbulletin.com, several of mine and many others - that proves there is no problem getting a vbulletin indexed. Meaning it isnt a problem with the vbulletin software if your not being indexed.
well i got vbseo, so i can be the guinee pig we'll see what happens and before you start bashing a) i'm a compulsive shopper b) i really like the mod_rewrites to the forum and thread titles and c) i do realize the price is a ripoff, but chitika has been good to me another bonus i've noticed...i'm getting SEO ads which are worth more hehe