Nex, is that crawler list an addon from vb.org? Or is this something from the vbenhancer site?
Removed VBSEO - Feel Confident About The Decision
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sorry if this is advertising, but there is no other place for serious business...oh no, i'm not going with Xenforo... come on, i'm better than that... i stick with Wordpress... roflComment
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It is answers like this that are unwarranted and uncalled for by individuals that have nothing better to do then bash others based on misguided information.
VBSEO makes many changes to the site it is installed on.
Now can you do this without vbseo? Absolutely yes. But vbseo does it for you. So if you think it is worth the money to have it done for you then go for it. Feel like customizing things yourself then save your $$$ and have a free for all.
SEO is not a perfect science. No one has the alogrythms the search engines use so no one can say for sure line by line what they are looking for. BUT we do know alot of the basics based on trail and failure and seeing how it effects rankings. SEO is forever changing and we will always be chasing our tail.-----------------------------------------------------------
Running custom version of vBulletin based on v4.2.5
PHP 7.4.14 :: MariaDB 10.5.8Comment
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Ditto what 1QuickSI said. You can do just about everything vBSEO does on your own. But if your time is worth $100/hr and it saves you 2 hours, then you're immediately ahead.
Until vB4 is released, vBSEO adds important usability elements. I think people sorely undervalue the importance of human readable URLs. When vB has them, the major reason for vBSEO will vanish. But until then, they *do* matter. People post links to our site all the time and it's obvious what they're about from url. This usability matters. I get so frustrated when I see a stock link to a vB forum and I have to follow it to know what it's about. Sites that care about their users spend a lot of time building intelligent urls. Sites that don't care or get it, don't. And savvy users can tell the difference.
Search engines care when a keyword is in the URL as well. We compete for first page results on a lot of terms and have noticed that placing the keyword in the URL makes a significant difference. Because position one is 5x better than position 2 in Google, this can be a large amount of traffic. This may not be a big deal to you. But if you run a business, then it matters.
Bottom line: for anyone that runs a revenue generating website that accounts for most or all of their income, vBSEO has made a lot of sense. When vB4 comes out, many of the advantages will vanish. But if you look at their feature list, there are a lot of small tweaks that may still justify a measly $200.Comment
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I have been thinking about this for a while, and tonight I decided to remove VBSEO from my forum. Please, this is not a negative about VBSEO, nor do I want it to turn into such a thread, this is just my thoughts on my own forum and future vBulletin direction.
Years ago I believe such a product was essential to aid vBulletin with search engines, and it was... however; technologies have changed drastically with SE's and both vBulletin software itself has changed, and from a standard install I see no major issue with the software today that really tells me to pay another provider to tune the software further, because its not really essential any more. Yes, vBulletin still lacks some basics like friendly URL's and the ability to include the "nofollow" attribute out of the box, but I believe vb4 is certainly working towards being more friendly in some of these instances.
Knowing some of the coming developments from lots of reading here, I have decided to strip VBSEO out of my own forums in preparation to the newer version of vBulletin and run with their standard out of the box solutions. Sure, its painful to have all your URL's re-indexed and lose a little traffic for a short time, but its nothing overall in the scheme off things IMHO.
The more I read here and upon vb.org, I find it will be much easier to travel ahead with less reliance upon outside software and integration, and instead stay as close as possible to an out of the box solution, especially now vb are really stepping things up with content management and listening to users, implementing factors that are just expected from content mangement software of any kind, be it CMS, blogging or forum software.
I am looking forward to the new release and times ahead... and now no more extra fee's to another which I can contribute towards the VBCMS for all of my forums and future developments.I think you've made the right decision in the long-run. It's always better to keep your board as close to "stock" as possible using only vBulletin official add-ons or features already there if your planning to upgrade with each new version. And stock SEO Tools will be there in vB4 soon to use. Google has no problems indexing vBulletin anyway, and it's always changing the way it ranks sites which has nothing to with the way URL's are re-written. Plus it's more than capable of removing duplicate content itself.
I personally think, if you can keep your site XHTML valid, to help keep it as browser friendly as possible for spiders as well as people coming, and add good original content worth reading, and use a robots.txt file to help point Bots in the right direction. It will reap it's own rewards for you, with or without any further SEO Tools added. I think these days way too much fuss is made over SEO being needed. Nobody really knows how Google ranks one site higher than another, or what factors come into play the most - other than Google themselves.Comment
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Remember, showing up in search engine results and forum traffic and growth are two separate things.
If you think vBSEO is going to explode the traffic of a forum with a narrow focus, one that really does not have a ton of public interest in the first place, you will be disappointed for sure.
I know of some forums that present false stat's anyway, they have their cookie time out set on the max and show hundreds of members online when in reality they only have a few people online live.
One of them that is the worst offender uses vBSEO, so don't fall for the hype, dig a bit deeper and look at the largest vB forums to see what they are running.Comment
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Ditto what 1QuickSI said. You can do just about everything vBSEO does on your own. But if your time is worth $100/hr and it saves you 2 hours, then you're immediately ahead.
Until vB4 is released, vBSEO adds important usability elements. I think people sorely undervalue the importance of human readable URLs. When vB has them, the major reason for vBSEO will vanish. But until then, they *do* matter. People post links to our site all the time and it's obvious what they're about from url. This usability matters. I get so frustrated when I see a stock link to a vB forum and I have to follow it to know what it's about. Sites that care about their users spend a lot of time building intelligent urls. Sites that don't care or get it, don't. And savvy users can tell the difference.
Search engines care when a keyword is in the URL as well. We compete for first page results on a lot of terms and have noticed that placing the keyword in the URL makes a significant difference. Because position one is 5x better than position 2 in Google, this can be a large amount of traffic. This may not be a big deal to you. But if you run a business, then it matters.
Bottom line: for anyone that runs a revenue generating website that accounts for most or all of their income, vBSEO has made a lot of sense. When vB4 comes out, many of the advantages will vanish. But if you look at their feature list, there are a lot of small tweaks that may still justify a measly $200.Comment
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Guests or spambots ?
Google will re-index the site and present new URL's.
Google holds their cards close to their chest, they still have a "silent supplemental search index" where most of the "unimportant content" resides.
They have also have their "main index" of pages that show up in the search results based on respected sites, it does take a lot of time and great content to "earn the respect of Google" though.Comment
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Second Week Report
Well, into the second week without vbseo now, overall down around 12% search engine traffic from my initial stats and holding quite steady thus far. A little climbing over the last 24hrs by 1%, which is positive to see with such a radical change without page redirects.
Google have dropped at a guess, around 80%+ of the old vbseo URL's in their listings and now show the standard URL's; the hand edited #1 position for my primary phrase / purpose still lists all vbseo URL's and don't expect that to change obviously until a person reviews it. My listings were around the 52,000 mark and with the change, now around 41,000. Google is still spending much more time in the site presently... so obviously still grabbing new URL's and listings... more than it usually is within the site from past statistics.
This has faired way better than my initial expectations had been. I expect this to take around three months before my site has fully recovered, though still very pleased with dropping the product outright with no individual page redirects or rewrites, in order to get back to a stock product solution. Very pleased thus far.Comment
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It doesn't take Google long to start dropping inactive URL's and indexing new ones it finds. I've found that to be the case when I've changed software being used, like going from vBulletin to WordPress. It's quite suprising really just how fast it works at doing it.
Although, I think it's fair to say it will most likely drop faster than in it re-lists new ones. So you have to expect a drop in traffic no matter what you do really.Comment
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by dog-tagHello,
I would like to know the future SEO functions of vBulletin 5?
Will it be a case of spending another $150 on vbseo, or will vbulletin take this seriously?
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Channel: Support Issues & Questions
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