vBSEO Worth buying?

[vbplusme]

Originally Posted by Loco.M

but my vote is undoubtably YES

Hmm, doesn't your affiliate commission taint that recommendaiton?

[Shazz]

Originally Posted by vbplusme

Hmm, doesn't your affiliate commission taint that recommendaiton?

Oooo... I wouldn't get tacky with loco :erm:

[bbcentral]

I only started using vBSEO in January. Personally I love it, I love how much faster my site seems to run now (a lot of features are disabled for guests to improve performance). I love how the pages that come up in Google from my forum seem to rank higher now, and only the important part of the page shows up in the search results.
I love how my forum has nicer URL's, although there are free mods to do the same thing (and vB4 will feature something similar).

Here's a little cheat, read this thread (I can't recommend this enough, it seriously helped me!):
http://www.vbseo.com/f45/your-site-r...o-first-23762/

Ignore anything that requires you to have vBSEO installed, but everything else is relevant.
Some simple changes like removing "Powered by vBulletin" from your forum title, having better forum descriptions, running Google Analytics and vBSEO Sitemap (Free) are quick and easy methods to improve your performance.

I'd say try doing as many of those things as possible and see if that boosts performance. Use Google Analytics Custom Campaigns to track different "Register" links and banners you have around your site, that way you'll know which links are resulting in new members joining.

Here's my forum running vBSEO, I have most of the options enabled:
http://www.bluesbrotherscentral.com/forum/
A lot of the changes I was able to do without vBSEO. I removed my boring default Welcome Message and replaced it with an image just under the navbar. It uses Google Analytics to work out how many people are clicking on it and signing up. I may change it to something different later and see if it has a higher registration rate, I can experiment and see what works.

So I guess all I'm saying is try all the other free options before you pay money to vBSEO. But even if you do pay for it, it's a quality product if that's what you need

[adamskiii]

Originally Posted by bbcentral

I only started using vBSEO in January. Personally I love it, I love how much faster my site seems to run now (a lot of features are disabled for guests to improve performance). I love how the pages that come up in Google from my forum seem to rank higher now, and only the important part of the page shows up in the search results.
I love how my forum has nicer URL's, although there are free mods to do the same thing (and vB4 will feature something similar).

Here's a little cheat, read this thread (I can't recommend this enough, it seriously helped me!):
http://www.vbseo.com/f45/your-site-r...o-first-23762/

Ignore anything that requires you to have vBSEO installed, but everything else is relevant.
Some simple changes like removing "Powered by vBulletin" from your forum title, having better forum descriptions, running Google Analytics and vBSEO Sitemap (Free) are quick and easy methods to improve your performance.

I'd say try doing as many of those things as possible and see if that boosts performance. Use Google Analytics Custom Campaigns to track different "Register" links and banners you have around your site, that way you'll know which links are resulting in new members joining.

Here's my forum running vBSEO, I have most of the options enabled:
http://www.bluesbrotherscentral.com/forum/
A lot of the changes I was able to do without vBSEO. I removed my boring default Welcome Message and replaced it with an image just under the navbar. It uses Google Analytics to work out how many people are clicking on it and signing up. I may change it to something different later and see if it has a higher registration rate, I can experiment and see what works.

So I guess all I'm saying is try all the other free options before you pay money to vBSEO. But even if you do pay for it, it's a quality product if that's what you need

Thank you very much for this. I will check it out and run some free products to see if it helps. Do you need to have vBSEO installed in order to install vBSEO Google/Yahoo Sitemap Generator?

[bbcentral]

Originally Posted by adamskiii

Thank you very much for this. I will check it out and run some free products to see if it helps. Do you need to have vBSEO installed in order to install vBSEO Google/Yahoo Sitemap Generator?

Nope, you can install the sitemap generator on its own!

I was running it for 6 months before I bought vBSEO.
It's available here:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=206169

Once you've got it working, sign up for Google Webmaster Tools:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
(It's not essential, but I do recommend it!)

When I login to my google account it shows me my sitemap, how many URL's were in it, how many were indexed, and also which pages/links it had problems with. I noticed that some of my forum posts had invalid links in them, and other errors which were causing problems. It's very handy information!

Here's how it looks for me once it's all up and running:
Attachment 95700


Attachment 95701

[BSMedia]

Originally Posted by Ohiosweetheart

good old fashioned seo works very well for me.

:up:

[adamskiii]

Originally Posted by bbcentral

Nope, you can install the sitemap generator on its own!

I was running it for 6 months before I bought vBSEO.
It's available here:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=206169

Once you've got it working, sign up for Google Webmaster Tools:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
(It's not essential, but I do recommend it!)

When I login to my google account it shows me my sitemap, how many URL's were in it, how many were indexed, and also which pages/links it had problems with. I noticed that some of my forum posts had invalid links in them, and other errors which were causing problems. It's very handy information!

Here's how it looks for me once it's all up and running:
Attachment 95700


Attachment 95701

The modification does not seem to come with a sitemap_index.xml.gz. Do I need to create one and place in my forum root?

thanks

[bbcentral]

Originally Posted by adamskiii

The modification does not seem to come with a sitemap_index.xml.gz. Do I need to create one and place in my forum root?

thanks

It creates it for you automatically

There should be instructions included with the modification, it's fairly easy to get working but you might need to tweak the settings a little bit.

[adamskiii]

Originally Posted by bbcentral

It creates it for you automatically

There should be instructions included with the modification, it's fairly easy to get working but you might need to tweak the settings a little bit.

Thank you very much, I really appreciate it. I have it working now.

Hope this will work and get some more indexed in google and yahoo

[slinky]

Originally Posted by BSMedia

:up:

Ditto. I have many posts in my forums and am noticing that those with 100K to over 1 million posts in established forums do not use vbseo. What scares me is the reliance on one script - encoded - that if something goes wrong you are totally hosed. I also don't want to lose hundreds of thousands of existing links in google. I've heard of various claims and lots of people who own vbseo sound like smarmy commercials ala the "I made $10000 a week using Google Adsense after 2 months" or Extenze male enhancement. The hawking here was ridiculous. I'm not saying it's a bad product but it was just way too expensive and many snakeoil sales tactics rubbed me the wrong way. If the biggest of the big boys didn't seem to need it, nor the growing boards, I figured it wasn't worth the crapshoot of hoping to heavens this thing will continue to work with my forums.

Your call but don't expect things to magically boost all your forums a#1 position overnight. Good SEO is important and just do what you can to optimize your site.