Negatives of vBSEO

-the best and most successful vbulletin forums dont use it

-if you want to quit it, your gonna have thousands of useless links cached in the search engines for at least 5 months until they all get reindexed

-anything that it provides you can get for free by doing it yourself or using free mods that are open source

-server overhead CAN be a problem on shared hosting anyway

-the benefits it provides will not make much of a difference as to the success of your forum to warrant 200$

that being said the content relevent keywords in url's is kinda cool and I definetly dont think its a bad product at all just a bit overpriced for what it provides and I feel that it falsely advertises in some ways

I dont feel that subfolder urls are anywhere near as effective as top domain urls

for ex

www.handball.com - relevent for handball

www.shoes.com/handball - not very relevent for handball at all

VBSEO guys popping up in these threads scares me lol, I feel like Im being watched everytime anyone mentions VBSEO

pleae give us some breathing room VBSEO!

 

I agree with your last statement!

I swear anywhere I go on any forum, if there is a thread about vBSEO, JWard is there. It's like he created a googlevBSEO and tracks all forums that post vBSEO related threads and harsh advertises his product.

 

I hope vbSEO doesn't try to respond to all the negative PR recently by releasing their branding free option at some insane price, now that would be the major loss of clients, worse yet, not releasing it at all.

 

the negative PR is nothing recent, theres discussions like this dating back years

 

biggest negative - its not cost effective, you could make a lot better use of $150

 

And that is all because of pricing and the closeness of the code

 

I've already answered this question..

why would those of us who have had great results with vbseo, sit back and watch ppl spout off the lies and mis-conpeptions about a this product.

I suppose that if someone was saying how horrible vBulletin is because of this and that, you would just watch the ignorance spread ??

-Bs

 

Nope, I'd give my input on the product. However, my opinion would not seem biased. it's not like I get money from vB to back them up. Though for vBSEO case, you get paid by them. So obviously you would want to help them out, you get paid for that

Anyways, if users want real responces on vBSEO. Visit the offical vB forum. They had to close the thread their because of all the bad responces of vBSEO.

 

I dont think we are being ignorant, its simply a difference of opinion. I think VBSEO often ends up being an impulse buy and its better to see both sides of the coin.

 

I was still considering this till I read about the annual fee. Now I just won't bother anymore.

I have used phpBB for 4 years and was happy with it. I design themes for it, I know how to use it, I ran my webmaster forums on a heavily modded phpBB with a unique theme and was great. I HAD to buy VB just because of all this "VB is professional" thing. I was sick of hearing my forums are bad because I use a free script.

Back then NO ONE would tell you about the fact you have to pay 30 USD a year for that support. All they said was: it's a fantastic piece of software for only 160 USD.

So I made the transition. As I wrote in my blog, I am not that pleased with it, at least I don't quite see what I pay for 30 USD a year. It's a good script, but most of what it does I had with a free script, modded and FREE of any obligations.

Now I hear about this SEO thing.

I downloaded yesterday Zoints SEO and I installed it on my forums. Won't do wonders perhaps, but at least it's FREE. It doesn't have viable support? As long as it works, I'm OK. I pay 30 USD a year for the VB support and guess what: when I do bump into errors I don't expect any support. I just write in the specialized forums and people like me and you, users, not developers, come and tell me how to solve it. I used a script years and years and all I needed was to rely on the community. It looks like VB has some communities too (not only the specialized forums, but others too).

And now .. after almost fainting hearing that a SEO hack costs almost as a VB license I hear that I have to pay for support too? And again .. all those people presenting this in a "let me sell it to you now" way failed to mention that you have to pay yearly for support (I agree with the statement that you WILL pay. You cannot afford having an unsupported script that might break. So yes, we might all pay).

My short rant conclusion: I am tired of all these schemes. Of "get an owned license with 160 USD ... oh by the way .. do you know you also have to pay 30 USD EACH YEAR so that you just use that script". I was almost tempted to try this script. My members offered to buy it for me (donations) and I was tempted. But not anymore. I just won't enter another "slavery" for a script that's so controversial. I read about this on other big forums and yet I am not convinced that this hack does more than Zoints or just a normal forum with some "normal' seo work.

And yes, the fact huge forums like WHT or even DP (since we're here) don't use this hack make me certain I don't want it. I will use the free "version", the Zoints SEO hack, as unsupported and stupid as some claim and be able to spend that 150 USD for something else.

I don't want to offend anyone. But having to pay more and more for a script it's too much for me. I like my independence and I lost it once I moved to VB. I modded my own boards (learnt code changes and did my own stuff). I even design my own forum skins JUST to be "free" and not have to depend on any support. This is why, in this matter, I chose FREE again.

I hope that people who invested in VB SEO do have a return. It's their money. It has to be a good script if people buy it. But not for me. I had enough of this "strategy" and just come to a point in my life I return to what I liked: experimenting something with no obligations

 

- closed source
- expensive

 

Bravo dojo!

 

phpBB is a good peice of software and definelty a great alternative to Vbulletin but wasnt this thread about VBSEO? lol

 

sadly it was... and it seems like anywhere vBSEO threads are posted they are closed.... or die off.

 

Can I ask how vBSEO goes with having lots of mods integrated into a forum - is this an issue?

 

I have a very customized forum - and I don't have a problem at all with vbSEO - aside from one little bug I reported that has already been fixed for the next release that really wouldn't widely apply - you have to be using a particular feature and you have to be using stylesheets from an external domain - but even then it was easy to work around.

Their tech support is usually very responsive.

 

Since we use the plugin system, conflicts with other mods are extremely rare. You can search our forums for specific mods you have installed to find out more.

 

vBSEO is amazing. I use it with zoint tags system. Results are great.

You won't need to remove it every, the traffic just grows and grows. 800,000 -> 130,000 alexa.

 

What is the annual fee for anyway?

 

It's a small written text on the buy page.