vBSEO - anyone use?

[Mikhailtech]

Recently I've been looking into ways to make some more $$ with my message board. For the first time I came across SEO products, and shortly thereafter I found VBSEO. Does anyone use this software? I've read the "success stories" on their site and can definitely agree with SEO methodology, but I wanted to get a second opinion before biting the bullet.

Any success stories here?

[WurkAnimal]

I'm seriously thinking of lucking to buy vBSEO, I've heard some good storied about it.

[Mazinger]

This SEO is pretty amazing. The first Arabic forum that used it, got the rank of 194 at Alexa.

[Floris]

This SEO is pretty amazing. The first Arabic forum that used it, got the rank of 194 at Alexa.

Cool, which forum URL is that?

[Mazinger]

http://forum.sh3bwah.com

Actually, it's 193 now not 194.

[WurkAnimal]

Is that because of VbsEO tho?

[Mazinger]

Is that because of VbsEO tho?

Yeah - to the extent that if you search for 'forums' (in Arabic text), you'll find this site always in the first search results. So, it has taken an excellent rank at Google.

[WurkAnimal]

Nice

[---MAD---]

Problem is a hack like this will mess with a lot of things which is annoying. I wonder if vBulletin has any plans to make changes to improve SEO further.

[Mikhailtech]

Problem is a hack like this will mess with a lot of things which is annoying.

Like what? It's a plugin not a hack (unless that's what they're called now).

[Chroder]

I use it and like it I think the price point is a little high. It bugs me a bit to pay more for a plugin then the product it plugs into But it works quite well and pretty seamlessly, nothing better available that does the same kind of thing. We're using it on Webmaster-Talk and The New Tech and it works beautifully. On WMT especially (TNT had it almost since the beginning) we saw a pretty significant increase in traffic after we added it.

[DanaSoft]

I've been using it for some four+ years and love it. Small price to pay for the quality I get from it and options it offers.

[bmc]

I've been using vBSEO for about half a year now, and I enjoy its benefits. It has greatly helped in significantly increasing my SEO rankings, as I am number one of millions of results for numerous search results in Google, as well as other search engines, such as (for each of these search results, my site is number one for all of them): "cool mac programs," "cool mac apps," "mac apps," "os x apps" (over 197,000,000 results and my site is number one!! ), "mac os x apps" (over 112,000,000 results and my site is again number one!! ), etc. And for other results, I come up either second or third. It has greatly helped our site, and I love vBSEO - I would highly reccommend it!

[RedTyger]

I've been using vBSEO for about half a year now, and I enjoy its benefits. It has greatly helped in significantly increasing my SEO rankings, as I am number one of millions of results for numerous search results in Google, as well as other search engines, such as (for each of these search results, my site is number one for all of them): "cool mac programs," "cool mac apps," "mac apps," "os x apps" (over 197,000,000 results and my site is number one!! ), "mac os x apps" (over 112,000,000 results and my site is again number one!! ), etc. And for other results, I come up either second or third. It has greatly helped our site, and I love vBSEO - I would highly reccommend it!

But all of those search results point to your index page, which makes no use of vBSEO (except pointing to other pages, it's not the receipt of any direct vBSEO changes) so it can't have affected your placing. Even if your index page did make use of vBSEO it's unlikely to make much difference, your index page is almost certainly going to be your highest ranked page no matter what you put on it. I note that you're using Wordpress on your index page as well, software which is in itself much better geared toward search engines than vBulletin, if not vBSEO, is. If you can find a page of your forum using Google, then you can perhaps attribute some of it's success to vBSEO.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying vBSEO is useless. If your traffic rocketed after installing it then great, it's doing its job. But credit where it's due and all that.

[bmc]

But all of those search results point to your index page, which makes no use of vBSEO (except pointing to other pages, it's not the receipt of any direct vBSEO changes) so it can't have affected your placing. Even if your index page did make use of vBSEO it's unlikely to make much difference, your index page is almost certainly going to be your highest ranked page no matter what you put on it. I note that you're using Wordpress on your index page as well, software which is in itself much better geared toward search engines than vBulletin, if not vBSEO, is. If you can find a page of your forum using Google, then you can perhaps attribute some of it's success to vBSEO.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying vBSEO is useless. If your traffic rocketed after installing it then great, it's doing its job. But credit where it's due and all that.

You can also search for additional search queries related to osx apps and forums, and you will see my forum return number one as well. I see what you mean though. Our site has been around for a few years now, and we receive approximately 20,000 to 25,000 hits daily. Additionally, our new and returning users are nicely balanced at 50% each, meaning as many new people are finding us per day as we are retaining our returning users - that tells me that it's the best it can get, with an equal number of new and returning users per day. Additionally, we do have advanced tracking and monitoring software for our sites, and some of those hits have accrued from the forums. Nonetheless, we don't gain all our traffic solely from the forums, and I wouldn't suggest the vBSEO addon as a hindrance to our forums or our site.