I understand that, but I can't figure out how to fix it.

Why will the <!--@vbbanners:2@--> not work inside the vBulletin Ad Manager?

That would be the best way to implement it wouldn't it? Then I can control it's location properly.

The CSS/float issue is because for some reason when I put it in the ad_global_header2 template it's not showing there, and it's not pulling the css properly from the additional.css. It for some reason is showing up in ad_global_header, and isn't listening to the css instructions.

I'm also having issues here with using vBSEO's clean up HTML. Since I have to put the <!--@vbbanners:#@--> directly in the template, it's cutting it out and not displaying the ad.

Are we going to be able to put this code inside the vBulletin Ad Manger at some point?

That vBSEO feature (cleanup white space) accomplishes nothing really useful. vBSEO does a lot of things quite well and has a lot of features but just because a feature exists doesn't mean you have to use it. There are several newer vBSEO features that actually have a negative impact on server performance.

The cleanup feature doesn't negatively impact performance but it DOES interfere with this mod and what it does is entirely superfluous. Spiders can navigate white space and ignore comments quite well - that's what they are designed to do - and any impact of comment lines on page load speeds is purely theoretical.

Your choice: Include a vBSEO feature which really has minimal or zero benefit to your forum OR disable that feature and use the rotating banners mod which can potentially have a huge benefit for you and your forum.

For me it was an easy decision.

Well it did speed up my page load significantly, but maybe I can work it another way. I'm trying to speed up the load of my forum, as it's showing slow to google. Slow site = worse rankings.

What did you use to measure page load and come to that conclusion? As I said, what that feature does is primarily compress pages by removing white space and comments and frankly that should have a neglible effect on either SEO or load speed.

If your page is loading slowly, you'd be further ahead by ensuring that your server and vBulletin are enabled for gzip.

I use webpagetest.org, and google's site performance rating to determine what speed my pages are running at.

How do I go about making sure the Gzip is working optimal for Vbulletin?

GZIP HTML Output : Yes
GZIP Compression Level: 1

Is it enabled on your server? Check with your host of necessary.

If you're still loading slowly, you might want to investigate server caching, e.g., eAccelerate, XCache, or at least file caching at the server level.

Using all that as well.. ;)

Your forum is heavily modded but seems to load fairly quickly for me. However, two things I can see right away as problems that may contribute to slow page loads are that annoying vBSEO tweets script and the chat room.

Think about disabling some of your add-ons and rechecking load speeds until you find out what's dragging down your forum.

Also, are you using Google Analytics? Google itself identified that as one of the things slowing my page loads. I dumped it - I get enough stats from AWSTATS anyway.