VBSeo Any Good fro Forum SEO?

[webcosmo]

VBulletin is a great software for bulletin boards. But for SEO purposes it need some more love.

I was looking at different options. VBSEO (vbseo.com) seem to be a good one. Does anybody have positive experience using this software with your forum?

[worldofchat]

Hi there

I use it on my forums, and its pretty good the support is pretty good, has it made much differece to my site, now thats hard to say !

So I would reccomend it, I wouldnt expect it to make a massive difference to your site though.

Woc

[buldozerce]

IMO, You won't need it. SP, DP and other big boards don't use it.

[ryanhellyer]

I think the main problem with these types of software is that they will be adding extra resource requirements to your forum. If you can handle the extra CPU usage then they can be a really good idea as they feature some pretty useful methods of getting new visitors. In particular I like the trackback features.

Be aware that most of what they advertise they can do is total bunkum. A good quality theme will do more than an SEO plugin. Most vBulletin themes are shockingly poorly coded so quite large SEO improvements can be made with a total theme rewrite.

An alternative (and free) route to the same functionality would be to use SMF and the Pretty Permalinks Mod. With a total theme recode you should be able to get much the same functionality as a vBulletin/SEO plugin combo and it will probably run faster and be less resource intensive too. There is no trackbacks feature for SMF though unfortunately.

[webcosmo]

Appreciate all the useful comments.

One thing I realized reading out what they do, its gonna take months pretty much to get any significant effect.

I am running a forum only 6 months old. Now that I have established a reasonably good number of regular users, I am thinking of using vbseo to tapp into any additional traffic I can get.

based on what you folks said, it seem to be forums may slow down somewhat because of the modrewrite I guess. i just bought the software yesterday, still to be installed. lets see how things turn up.

[worldofchat]

It does take up a few more resources on your forum, but nothing significant as my forum is still on shared hosting and runs fine.

I think the best way to think about it, is do you want to have friendly urls on your site ? if so then go for it, I wouldnt buy in the hope its going to gain you more traffic.

Woc

[webcosmo]

One other thing I have noticed is, if it does generate increased traffic that would be from long-tail keywords. The newer version of vbulletin got the nice feature of tagging threads that also help.

[libbert]

Was about to post the same thread.

@webcosmo
Have you experienced any differences lately? It the forum slower and have you received more Google traffic lately?

[webcosmo]

Originally Posted by libbert

Was about to post the same thread.

@webcosmo
Have you experienced any differences lately? It the forum slower and have you received more Google traffic lately?

Its did made some changes. I would highly recommend it. Big forums probably can go without it, but for new ones its big help.

Traffic from long tail(google specially) keywords jumped by 50%. I haven't seen much increase in sign up rates though, but there is little increase in rate.

Lot of people think it increases page load time big time, it really does not add big load if you have a decent server. The little increase, I would say 500ms or less, can be justified by the benefits.

So far my experience is positive with vbSeo.