"vB4 is horrible for SEO"
 

I'm going to get an SEO guy to look into improving the ranking my vB4 CMS website. One highly rated guy has got back to me and has told me that "vB4 is horrible for SEO", and that I should consider using Wordpress for the CMS + vB3.x for the forum.

Obviously the thought of changing to this setup is terrifying (especially the idea of moving to a near-obselete version of vB, which sounds like insanity).

That said, the guy runs a website with an Alexa ranking of <50,000. My website is currently ranked at around 350,000. Surely he must know what he's taking about if he can achieve that.

Thoughts?

A high Alexa rate is not the standard to use. If you want your site to do better focus on content.

vB4 is better out of the box than vB3, SEO wise. :)

SEO is so way overrated ... I would just focus on having good fresh content all the time and good discussions in your forums....don't overemphasize SEO my Man ....thats just my opinion....

It is NOT "horrible" for SEO, far from it.

How much money is this guy talking about taking from you?

Like the other guys said, CONTENT is king. Relevant and fresh and dynamic.

Wordpress is crap and always has been, by the way.vB 3.8.7 and 3.8.8 are not near obsolete - they are both still supported. Eight of the top ten largest forums that run vBulletin are version 3.x.x or lower - one of those even still runs vB 2.

One thing you can do to improve SEO is backlinks - link your site either in your signature or your profile, everywhere you can on the web.

Your SEO guy tell you that?

Start with your profile here.

I use joomla for my cms and people in my genre find our site with no problems. I used to use wordpress and quickly dropped it for joomla....

But yes, content, content, content MAN! If you add say one new article every day and plenty of images as well, you will be fine. Make sure you name your images correctly though and you add the "alt" and "title" to each image.

Joomla is a excellent CMS choice. That and its cousin, Mambo.

And you're right it doesn't make a damn bit of difference what platform you're on if you don't have relevant, fresh, dynamic content.

Yeah , I love everything about joomla man, I tried Mambo before joomla too and it was very good as well....

The top 10 vB boards that still run v3 and v2, don't have SEO problems. It ain't the platform. It's the content.