So I just removed ZSEO... Forum seo discussion.

[WritersBeat]

I removed ZSEO from my main forum.

Mainly because I didn't want to deal with the hassle of extra software, and depending on someone else, and also for an experiment to see if it really did make a difference. Of course I am going to suffer in the beginning because the url's are going to be changing, and so are the descriptions and everything else, but once that settles down, will it really make a difference?

What have you noticed with this stuff? Is it worth it to install one of these SEO plugins? Do you have a huge board that isn't optimized? I mean if I google vbulletin.com and check out it's index, it's indexed pretty damn well. I don't see what is going to make something rank higher unless it's linked to a lot, and that's just going to happen no matter what with or without seo.

What's your take on it?

[FreshFroot_]

I don't think you need a SEO program to help with ranks.. honestly.. it has made a difference for some, but at the same time many have used SEO products and noticed no difference.. Personally don't waste your money.. vB is pretty SEO friendly..

[simsim]

Mainly because I didn't want to deal with the hassle of extra software, and depending on someone else, and also for an experiment to see if it really did make a difference. Of course I am going to suffer in the beginning because the url's are going to be changing, and so are the descriptions and everything else, but once that settles down, will it really make a difference?

This is illogical reasoning! There's nothing wrong with using "extra software" to extend your forum's functionality & performance, if these software are well-written & secure. Also, you would need to do some real benchmarking depending on your own site's stats before judging the efficiency of SEO packages.

[---MAD---]

Many have said that SEO plugins only make the urls human readable whilst the default vbulletin urls are SEO friendly already just not by humans.

[MRGTB]

Oh, not another argument over the SEO thing again! please......

Give this SEO thing a rest, if people want to buy it because they think it's a miracle solution, let them go buy it and see for themselves if they've wasted there money or not.

[---MAD---]

Oh, not another argument over the SEO thing again! please......

Give this SEO thing a rest, if people want to buy it because they think it's a miracle solution, let them go buy it and see for themselves if they've wasted there money or not.

Precisely!

[BamaStangGuy]

Oh, not another argument over the SEO thing again! please......

Give this SEO thing a rest, if people want to buy it because they think it's a miracle solution, let them go buy it and see for themselves if they've wasted there money or not.

I'd rather spare them from the disappointment that it isn't a miracle worker so they don't run around whining because their forum with 10 backlinks doesn't out rank 10 year old sites with hundreds of thousands of them.

That's what forums are for anyway right? Discussion? Not just to let everyone dive into something without any information. Sure they can search but no one ever does..... so it gets rehashed again and again.

[Loco.M]

seo work isn't for everyone, let's just leave it at that

[Floris]

Disruptive posts deleted from this thread.

[FreshFroot_]

Just wanted to applogize to BamaStangGuy.. I have to agree with him and Loco.. buy vBSEO. Vbulletin isn't search friendly as you think it would be...

[MRGTB]

I'd rather spare them from the disappointment that it isn't a miracle worker so they don't run around whining because their forum with 10 backlinks doesn't out rank 10 year old sites with hundreds of thousands of them.

That's what forums are for anyway right? Discussion? Not just to let everyone dive into something without any information. Sure they can search but no one ever does..... so it gets rehashed again and again.

Well fair enough, out of curiousity though. With all this talk about double content having a negitive effect of ranking as well. I've sometimes wondered why vBulletin have not concidered doing a U-Turn and totally removed the Print Friendly and Archive Pages from vBulletin completly. To make it more SEO friendly. I do know the Archive pages can be turned off via the admincp. Not sure about the Print Friendly pages though.

[Lizard King]

Well fair enough, out of curiousity though. With all this talk about double content having a negitive effect of ranking as well. I've sometimes wondered why vBulletin have not concidered doing a U-Turn and totally removed the Print Friendly and Archive Pages from vBulletin completly. To make it more SEO friendly. I do know the Archive pages can be turned off via the admincp. Not sure about the Print Friendly pages though.

You can add rel="nofollow" to printthread links also you can add printthread.php to your robots.txt . Not all search bots rely on robots.txt but at least google does.

[ThorstenA]

Print friendly threads should be totally removed from vbulletin and a printer friendly css should be there instead. Ever printed a wikipedia or wordpress article? You just print out the page and it's completely different than your screen view

[RedTyger]

Totally agree. Although it's nice to see how it will look beforehand. I personally would not use friendly URLs unless they were in vBulletin's standard featureset. You'd run into a world of trouble if you used a third party and they stopped producing their product.

[simsim]

Print friendly threads should be totally removed from vbulletin and a printer friendly css should be there instead. Ever printed a wikipedia or wordpress article? You just print out the page and it's completely different than your screen view

Strongly agree. You could customize the look of an HTML page to look exactly like a A4 page with CSS.