vBulletin, an SEO nightmare... here are some tips

That has been my point all along.

Maybe a PR8 authority or news site linked to you causing increased credibility within the SEs - maybe there was an algo change that was favorable to you - maybe a penalty was down graded by that algo -

That said - Lets assume for a moment that vBSEO really helped you. How do you know it was the URL rewrite that helped and not title and description changes or linking strategy? You dont. Nobody has studied vBSEO in a logical, unbiased way and published their findings.

I find that interesting to be honest. If it was me that owned vBSEO, I would have bought 10 dead forums, added vBSEO, and tracked keyword progress while doing no other SEO. Then I would have published the keyword placement increases - that would establish if vBSEO, in and of itself, had an impact.

Fact is - as its been said - many sites are well indexed and well ranked without vBseo.

When I asked where the improved traffic came from - was it one keyword, several -did you go from page 10 to page 1 on a particular keyword? To be honest, when you say "Traffic went up from all SE's." that takes a little credibility out of your argument because I highly doubt all SEs would react the same way at once.

 

It should be possible to "un-rewrite" your URL's if the need became necessary. the SEO/URL Rewriting script I installed on my forum about a year ago has pretty much disappeared. It still works as of 3.64, but the day may come when it doesn’t.

In my case the id's are in the filenames that get rewritten, so I would just have to write a regexp to reverse it and then do a 301 after uninstalling the product.

SEO would probably take an initial hit, but it shouldn't be that bad.

 

I'm not sure if archive should be removed but based on my experience.. do not keep the same title, description, keywords for every page. I was badly hurt due to it when I used phpBB. I'd suggest you to remove that extra $vboptions[bbtitle] from the SHOWTHREAD template's title tag at least.

 

note that if you take the advice from the original post, Analytics will no longer track your vB forums.

 

Why wouldn't it ?
If you add the code in your footer, it most certainly will work

I've done most the things listed in this thread and analytics works fine.