Is vBSEO Worth The Money?

[ihatebusy]

Somebody (not here in this forum) recommended vBSEO service to me, i carefully reviewed its service, but still get no idea if it is necessary for Vbulletin.

Can anybody advise if vBSEO is worth the money ? 149 Dollars is not cheap for a plugin.

It claimed many features listed that vBulletin can not do:

http://www.vbseo.com/en/feature-matrix/

Is that true?

[Ramsesx]

There's no proof if it will boost your visitor counts. It could or it could not. The comparison list may be right. If you do a search here you may find a lot of opinions about vbseo.

[reefland]

In my opinion, yes it is worth the money in default features and extended functionality.

[motowebmaster]

I think vbseo represents a good investment, but if you have a great deal of content already then you'll want to carefully consider how you will implement it.

[MRGTB]

I think it's always been highly questionable if it does make any real difference for your forum. Some say it does, some say it doesn't. Both sides have given information to prove both points of view. It's a gamble more than anything else, because there is nothing concrete out there to prove anything either way.

vBSEO are masters at hyping their own product up, let's mix no bones about that one. The question is, do you buy into it and believe what they claim?

[TheLastSuperman]

I think it's always been highly questionable if it does make any real difference for your forum. Some say it does, some say it doesn't. Both sides have given information to prove both points of view. It's a gamble more than anything else, because there is nothing concrete out there to prove anything either way.

vBSEO are masters at hyping their own product up, let's mix no bones about that one. The question is, do you buy into it and believe what they claim?

So basically your saying, seeing proof from both sides your none the wiser correct? And you posted that reply? WOW

SEO works, everyone knows that plain and simple now there's tons of SEO "Masters" out there arguing about the best way to do it other than that it's this simple - If your not up to par on SEO or how to properly SEO your forum then purchase otherwise you need to learn it a bit then tackle seo in regards to your forum .

[Luna66]

Interesting.

I have vBSEO and I can't say it's worth it. We've only gotten 1 member from a search engine.... gotta tons of spammers, tho.

[bforum]

In my opinion, yes it is worth the money ,but mouth to mouth advert is working better for some boards
depends on the content whats your board is about, i have content for a small group so for me is mouth to mouth better ,and i bought it before i really thought about it ,but its working good since Google does pick it up really fast so it does the job

[feldon23]

So basically your saying, seeing proof from both sides your none the wiser correct? And you posted that reply? WOW

MRGTB will gladly take both sides of an argument.

[MRGTB]

So basically your saying, seeing proof from both sides your none the wiser correct? And you posted that reply? WOW

I'm saying believe what you will, because both arguments for and against have already been posted and flogged to death here.

[mccollin]

This is one of those situations where you have to probably think a little on your own. Up until vbulletin added SEO friendly urls to their product, it was kind of a given that if you wanted to get good SEO, then vBSEO was the way to go. I have two forums... had vBSEO on one of them for many years, and never added it to the other. The one with it gets more traffic, but it was getting more before I added it. But back to thinking here... SEO does work for websites in general, and the vBSEO people are very knowledgable about that topic and seem to know what they are doing. Its near impossible to separate the effect of their product from all the other factors that effect search engines dealing with your site. But I look at it this way, I know they are experts and I'm not... and I know they are keeping their product tuned to optimize my forum. There are also a LOT of other capabilities in their product that can help you... for example I just moved some content around in transition to the CMS, and vBSEO let me easily put in redirects without fiddling with systems files to do it.

EDITED - (Based on the posts below, this isn't really an issue) So the net of it is that I have vBSEO on my forum that pays the bills, and not on my other one. Weigh it carefully, because once you go with it, then you will pretty much have to stay with it forever because it changes all your urls for internal and external links. Once people start picking up those urls and posting them places, you will not ever want to turn off vBSEO or all those links will be broken. So it is a long term commitment if you go with it. I think its worth it for sites that you want to drive the most traffic possible into.

[Ace]

Once people start picking up those urls and posting them places, you will not ever want to turn off vBSEO or all those links will be broken. So it is a long term commitment if you go with it. I think its worth it for sites that you want to drive the most traffic possible into.

If you maintain the 'id' variable in your vBSEO rewritten URL, it's a simple matter of adding a few .htaccess lines to redirect the traffic back to the original vB dynamic URLs. We even provide them if you ask.

[mccollin]

That's good to know Ace... who's the "we" that will provide the .htaccess lines? I doubt I'll ever stop using vBSEO, but its good to know for the future just in case. I have been burned SO many times by add-on developers that disappeared. I don't see that happening with vBSEO (they are so big), but better safe than sorry.

[Ace]

That's good to know Ace... who's the "we" that will provide the .htaccess lines? I doubt I'll ever stop using vBSEO, but its good to know for the future just in case. I have been burned SO many times by add-on developers that disappeared. I don't see that happening with vBSEO (they are so big), but better safe than sorry.

Sorry, forgot I didn't have any of my vBSEO.com details in my profile here. I'm the same Ace from the vBSEO team.

(So, the 'we' would be the vBSEO team. Support ticket request it if you need it.)

[mccollin]

Thanks, that's good to know. Your support over there is always fantastic. Like I said, I like knowing that you guys are tuning my SEO instead of me having to worry about it.