[Forum] Why is Vbulletin killing our SEO? Has Your Traffic Dropped after Upgrading to VB4?

[xinnek]

Am I the only forum owner that has noticed that the forum name is now excluded from thread titles? This has proven to be nearly fatal to one of my forums with around 20,000 members. Without keywords added to the posts, some threads make absolutely no sense or will never be found. Even threads you may think are titled half deceit like: "When to change synthetic oil" brings no traffic if it isn't coupled with a keyword associated with the forum like "Honda Accord Forum", "Golf MKV Forum", "Subaru WRX Forum", etc. Google puts some of its strongest weight on titles. This goes for adsense too. So get ready to lose 90% of your adsense income.

So someone searching for "Honda Accord When to change synthetic oil" will probably never find your thread now titled "When to change synthetic oil" in google. Actually that search will return thousands of results, the only forum results is where either the forum name shows up in the title or if the Thread creator had the forethought of including "Honda Accord" in it's thread title. This of course hardly ever happens, members don't think to add "Honda Accord" if they are on a "Honda Accord" forum. But searchers and Google can't read the poster's thoughts and needs some guidance to find the correct result.

At this time, I feel cheated and deceived by Vbulletin. I put my faith into you and I wasn't even notified that something this significant was missing in VB4 compared to VB3.8. This small fact that your tech seemed to find so insignificant, has cost me over 1500 unique visitors per day from just google. I've started putting in temporary fixes which has immediately caused my results to start to climb, but without at least the forum name in the title, I fear I'm not the only lamb being lead to slaughter

The idea fix for this would be to make thread titles amendable by forum. So a thread in a forum about a Ford Cougar wouldn't be mistaken by Google as a thread about Mountain Lions. i.e. "my cougar climbs mountains fast"

Making members change the title of their threads alienate them also. Plus who wants to look at 500 threads that has Chevrolet Avalanche as the first part of the thread. Makes for a very confusing time.
Here's how Google saw it in VB3.8

• Oil Change Intervals Chevrolet Avalanche Forum
• noob cool ride Chevrolet Avalanche Forum
• transmission problem Chevrolet Avalanche Forum
• wheel change Chevrolet Avalanche Forum
• healight fix Chevrolet Avalanche Forum
• interior light DIY Chevrolet Avalanche Forum

Now this is how google sees the same threads in VB4:

• Oil Change Intervals
• noob cool ride
• transmission problem
• wheel change
• healight fix
• interior light DIY

Get it? Each Forum needs to have variable keywords for the titles. VBULLETIN, PLEASE FIX THIS

BTW, Has anyone else upgraded to VB4.0 and seen their traffic drop off the face of the earth?

[Ferrari27]

do a search for a fix, you can edit the templates to include the title, don't know why it was dropped though, search for static text in pages I think you should find it

[xsquid]

My registered members traffic has dropped big time, may have to fold the board, wish I could revert to 3.8.4.

[Alien]

Did you also stick this into the bug tracker?

[xinnek]

I made a ticket about it and the tech didn't even think it was a big deal. I asked him to please have them reconsider not being able to add at least the main title to the threads. It would be even better if this could be changed by forum. I'm nearly in the same boat as xsquid. Definitely not supporting itself. I'm very upset that something this significant could fall through the cracks. VB GOLD = VB LEAD!

I've already started editing my templates, the problem is, this doesn't help if you sitemap overrides it. So I've disabled my sitemap. Hopefully this will fix it. Adsense is down to NOTHING. "bout ready to sell my VB licenses and my websites and try something else.

I'll add this to the bug tracker.

[audiokid]

are you using vbSEO?

[xinnek]

are you using vbSEO?

No. Maybe that's the problem. But why should I need to spend another $150. to have something that was already included int VB3.8?.

[beatyourtruck]

do a search for a fix, you can edit the templates to include the title, don't know why it was dropped though, search for static text in pages I think you should find it

This will be a huge issue for my forum as well......let's hope it's addressed by 4.0.2! I have so much time into setting up vb4 already, I will at the very least have to make a template mod before going live.

Thanks for posting this up and saving others your pain.

[motowebmaster]

Actually, stripping the name of the forum is advised on vbseo.com, but I can see how it would negatively impact some sites. It's got me thinking

Have you tried adding it back in and checking results?

[xinnek]

After adding specific styles where I manipulated the titles, I deleted my sitemap at google and let the adsense and google bots start crawling the site manually. This sucks because I'll lose a lot of threads that haven't been posted in for a long period of time. Adsense is still sucking, at the rate of less than a whole dollar with several thousand impressions. The good news is, I have found that there are a 2 results that have updated with the new titles and they actually come up in the serps.

I understand the concept behind stripping away the title for some forums, because it can be redundant. I think that is the exception rather than the norm. IMO, many forums will be literally destroyed if there is nothing done about this. I hope this doesn't happen to anyone else, but I believe there will be literally thousands of forums that will suffer if something isn't done about it. Come on VB, you've always done us proud in the past. Help us overcome this problem and show us you are the #1 forum software in the Universe! I really want to believe in you again.

[Al Zander]

I made a ticket about it and the tech didn't even think it was a big deal.

Submitting a ticket is not the same as submitting a bug report. Do up a bug report, link it in this thread and if enough people vote and comment in the bug report, then it has a better chance of persuading vB developers to address your concern. A one on one exchange through a ticket, or even a stray forum thread is not going to have the same effect.

[Loco.M]

removing the board name will help in your longtail SEO anyways, I recommend it to everyone

[barcena]

I don't know if Im understanding this very well but I do know that my Adsense is going down the drain dramatically after the upgrade to 4.0

As a help I placed my site name on the Welcome area so now it shows Welcome To XXXX but... My forum pr has lost a digit since the migration.

Im TRULY dissapointed and regret everyday have upgraded to vb4 so soon. Everything on the site is about looks but is failing on the core, for some reason i can't even put the vbseo on cuz this version and vbseo are not a good match server wise, so i spent my money on something i can't use.

The site's like a brainless model: beautiful yet incompetent.

[Loco.M]

ps.. page rank has nothing to do with your title or structure
Page rank is based on the links back to your site..

and pps.. if you are really upset about losing the duplicate title on every single page, it can easily be added back into the phrase or template

[barcena]

Well not everybody is a coder, some people just want to have a normal working site and the reallity is that since the migration my PR have dropped.