[jward]

Originally Posted by Caliber

Hello all,

Although much of vBSEO looks good, we are looking for an alternative to vBSEO because of its weaknesses. Specifically, we would like to have all of the same functionality, but we need the following:

1. vBSEO is encrypted so that if it conflicts with the other hacks that we have installed, it is impossible to modify the code in order to resolve a conflict.

2. If and when a security problem is discovered with vBSEO's encrypted code, we cannot fix it and our forums could be open to exploit.

3. Because the vBSEO license requires that you link back to them on every single page of your site, it is easy for anyone to search for vBSEO installations and exploit them.

4. vBSEO's requirement that you have an outbound link to them on every single page of your site, dilutes your own brand and bleeds PageRank from you to them and thereby negatively impacts your search engine positioning - something that the software was designed to do just the opposite of.

We approached vBSEO about paying extra for an unencrypted version without the onerous license requirement, but they were unreceptive, so we don't think that this would be a good solution for a large, highly hacked forum. Any alternatives that you might suggest would be most appreciated. Many thanks in advance!

Hi Caliber,

Here's some feedback for each of your key points:

1. As some have stated, vBSEO is compatible with almost all major plugins. From time to time there have been small issues reported that are immediately corrected by dev. We take a non-intrusive approach to prevent these conflicts from occurring, and even have a CRR module (Custom Rewrite Rules) to allow you to integrate vBSEO with your other hacks, including converting many of their URLs from dynamic to static versions.

2. There have been no security exploits ever demonstrated with vBSEO code. In fact, keeping our code encrypted, helps prevent many developers from evaluating the code for exploits. I can assure you, we take security very seriously, and security auditing is a part of our internal testing procedure. This is also an area that our pre-release (live forum testing) team monitors very closely.

3. There are no known vBSEO exploits, although it has been reported that Google and other search engines perform massive exploitation of vBSEO-enabled forums by indexing and ranking huge portions of your content.

4. At this time we do require a *vBSEO branding notice* to be included. However, (a) rel=nofollow is applied on all interior page links preventing Google PageRank leak from becoming an issue, and (b) we provide un-linked options for you to choose from in your vBSEO configuration file. Recently, the team has been in discussions regarding our copyright policy, based on user feedback. Policy revisions will be announced in the near future.

We power many large and highly hacked forums without issue.

Originally Posted by DChapman

ANY SEO script that utilizes mod_rewrite will slow loading time. That is directly caused by the usage of mod_rewrite. That's part of the reason Zoints SEO also has a means to insert keywords in URL without the use of mod_rewrite.

mod_rewrite jumps into the middle for some processing between a web browser (i.e.) request for a particular forum page and the server's response, so there is a very small performance impact. You will notice a higher impact if you are running on a server that is already over taxed in terms of resource usage. This is often the case if you are (a) on a shared webhost that is overrun with an excessive # of accounts on 1 server, or (b) your forum is extremely popular and running near its full capacity (FYI, If you're getting so much traffic that you need a new server, congratulations on your success!).

FYI Mod_rewrite is responsible for mapping incoming content relevant URLs (i.e. URLs with keywords) to the standard .php version. However, keyword insertion is handled by a server side script that processes page content in real-time.

Every feature vBSEO has is first evaluated for performance impact. As a result, vBSEO has been tested and performed well on highly active forums with concurrent users in the 1000s, as well as more common concurrent usage rates. vBSEO 3.0 is the most light weight vBSEO version to date, even despite the important new features that we've added.

As we announced today at the vBSEO forum, expect some *big* news coming from vBSEO in the very near future. That's all I can divulge for now.