Is vBSEO for vB4 Worth The Money?
 

A friend of mine who also has vB4 publishing suite recently bought vBSEO. We share the same host, URLJET. One of the techs installed it wrong so they asked them to fix it, the 'fixed it' and it's still causing issues. I'm going to help them out with this really soon. While I was researching vBSEO I looked at their features list. After reading that list, I can't figure out why anyone with a vb4 forum would buy this as most of it's features come standard in vB4:

http://www.vbseo.com/en/feature-matrix/

All standard in vB4 right?

Keyword-friendly URLs (Threads)
Keyword-friendly URLs (Member Profiles)
Keyword-friendly URLs (CMS)
Keyword-friendly URLs (Blogs)
301 Redirect Old Standard URLs

WTF is this for?

Permalinks (Posts)

Useless.

Social Bookmarking Per Thread Already got that

Looking at that list, for the money, it still isn't worth it in my opinion. Maybe they are seeing something that I don't see. I read vBSEO's success stories and it mostly applies to people who had old vb2 and vb3 forums. vB4 seems to have solved most of it's SEO issues.

Although I don't think vbSEO is worth the price, they are selling themselves short:

Full Pingback/Trackback/Refback System

^^^That feature says it's not available for vBSEO but I've seen it on vbSEO sites with vB4.

There are already dozens of threads about wether vBSEO is worth the money or not.

Personally to me its not. 5 Years ago perhaps when a lot of their tricks worked and mattered, however you want SEO success here it is.

Build great content, get other sites to link to your content.*

Sites in the same niche as yours help the most for backlinks, however a backlink from a site that isnt the same topic still helps.

My site is slacking on content. As a result, my traffic fell a little. So before I started working on their vBSEO, I started thinking about it, looked at all my stats and realized installing vBSEO would make no difference since I've already done a ton of SEO optimization as it is. I just have to step it up on the content level. I hope to change this around by installing Wordpress. I feel more comfortable posting content in that software and letting members be able to reply to the wordpress threads in vBulletin through the bridge than using the CMS which is aggravating as hell to deal with.

I am using vBSEO and I think its great.
I've been looking around for months until I finally decided.
There is more to it other than "rewrite urls"
vB 4 SEO will never become what vBSEO is, they have a dedicated team perfecting the product, where vBulletin still trying to figure out how to make an actual CMS page.

I am biased because I recently bought vBSEO (2 weeks ago) for my forums and I am happy with the product.
Now to be honest I haven't seen any changes since switching to vBSEO, but then again SEO doesn't change overnight, I will revisit this topic in few months and see.

I've noticed something recently:
Ranking for www.47r-squad.com
Global 1,463,656 8/24/2011

---------------------------------------
8/30

Alexa Traffic Rank: 1,237,312
United States Flag Traffic Rank in US: 389,189
Sites Linking In: 17

I don't know if its because of vBSEO, but my ranking has been going up.

Hmmm.

What was your forum software before switching to vBSEO and how long did you have it?

--------------- Added [DATE]1314766391[/DATE] at [TIME]1314766391[/TIME] ---------------

I noticed that your username on your site is similar to a guy on my site. If that is you then go ahead and post about your site in my break room subforum. That'll give you an extra backlink. Just make sure you post a dozen times before you create the thread so one thinks your a robot spam.

I am on your forums as "IcEWoLF".
Will do and thank you.

My software was the same, I did rebuild my whole website from scratch, lost 2 years of worth of posts and members.
Only difference between old forums and new forums is the design and me adding vBSEO and adding the vBSEO Sitemap instead of using the default vBulletin one.
In 2 months my forums grew up big time and the analytics are really showing how good it was.
There is lots of stuff I learned from the vBSEO forums, and I am still learning.
Again, I honestly think its a great software and it has a lot.
The real time analytics from gravity insight $99 is awesome (got it for free with vBSEO). It beats the google analytics big time.
Also they give you maxCDN for free for the first year which by itself is $40.
Honestly you are not just getting the software and great support, but you are getting a lot of features with it.
Many of the settings are pre-configured so you don't really need to do much.
I do strongly recommend enabling the google adsense targeting feature.
Again, I am biased because I own the software but I was just like you before I bought it.
As you can see on my forums, we received nearly $700 in donations this month alone, so I have a very strong community that helps us paying for the cost.
I would not have been able to do this without their help.

Oops I voted Yes but should have voted NO

Thanks a lot man I really appreciate your feedback on this. A lot of people I've talked to are like ugh quit arguing with me and just buy it.

I really have been considering buying it but like I said their features list looks weak to me compared to all of the SEO work I have already done on my site. For instance, I use mod-rewrite urls and I'm satisfied with them. I really don't want vbSEO's mod-rewrite urls. I don't think it would make a difference compared to what I have now and I also don't like the .html added at the end.

For instance, a member profile with vbseo is www.yoursite.com/members/username.html

I'm gonna pay my host to set it up so that member profiles are like myspace.com url rewrites like this: www.mysite.com/username That's shorter and more attractive.

I don't need real-time analytics or maxCDN as I get all that stuff from Cloudflare in your Cloudflare Thread

Waait. Are you going to use maxCDN and cloudflare at the same time?

Is that even possible? :confused:

So that leaves me with these vbSEO features: linkback, refbacks... pinging?

$149 for that? There's gotta be more to it cause then I'd just feel stupid if I bought it for their refback feature only which I probably don't need.

I've read that they have a pinging service in the pubsubhubbub thread. What's that about?