My Forums - Good SEO or Should Go for VB?

OK well I started a thread a few days ago about what is the best type of forum for SEO and it was concluded that VB or IPB out of the box are probably the best forum software. So this leads me to my next question - I currently am running a Runescape forum - www.rsboards.com - I have the SEO hack installed and it seems to be indexed in google fairly well (18,000+ pages) and gets around 2500 - 3000 visitors a day. So I'm thinking it is doing pretty well for itself and I mean its growing well etc etc, but having read these forums a little bit I'm thinking of converting over to VB, so I'm wondering is VB in its basic form (can't afford vbSEO at the moment) better than phpBB with the SEO hack and loads of other mods that currently making it an enjoyable community. Also is it very hard to convert phpBB over to VB and are they compatable? Also does anyone have or know of any examples of vbSEO that I could see. If you could check out my site and give some of your advice and insight I'd appreciate it.

 

Seeing how phpBB is a lot less secured than vB, I'd recommend that you try to port over on to VB as soon as possible.

 

Yeah a lot of people have said this also and I will consider this in my decision - but I'm more interested in some answers and opinions on the questions I have posed in my above post.

 

I personally cannot compare the SEO power of an SEO'ed phpBB forum as opposed to a "out of the box" vB forum, but I am going to guess that they are very close to the same. vB does not include session id's that phpBB does and vB has a search engine friendly archive included.

The conversion is actually quite easy considering everything that is involved. I say go for it, the SEO differences are probably slim, if not, I bet vB even has an upper hand. Given all of the other features you get with vB, I say go for it.

 

Thanks for the insight. Can I ask how much better is the vbSEO? I know it costs a lot but once my sites are established I'm sure I'd be happy to invest in it if it actually makes a difference.

 

haha, well, that is debateable. I don't want to get myself deep in it because I don't have loads of experience with vBSEO, but if I were you, I'd start with these threads and go from there -

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=68589
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=62657