How important is it to you that vBseo makes its way to xenForo?

How important is it to you that vBseo makes its way to xenForo?

  • Very important (I'm a vbseo licensed customer)

    Votes: 29 17.1%

  • Not that important (I'm a vbseo licensed customer)

    Votes: 35 20.6%

  • Very important (I would purchase a license)

    Votes: 5 2.9%

  • Not that important (I would not purchase a license)

    Votes: 101 59.4%
  • Total voters
    170
digitalpoint said:
For those curious...

For the last 12 months for digitalpoint.com...
  • 72.56% of all traffic is from search engines (this number is actually rising... it was 74.87% for the last 30 days)
  • 16.68% is direct traffic
  • 10.75% is from referring sites
Top 10 keywords used to come to site via search engines...
  • adsense
  • gooogle
  • hotfile premium link generator
  • keyword tracker
  • keyword suggestion tool
  • digital point
  • vbulletin 4
  • hottest girl in the world
  • digitalpoint
  • digital point forum
Random notes...
  • Overall traffic steadily increases month to month.
  • 10s of millions of visitors in the last year are from search engines.
  • Less than 0.1% of search engine traffic are from branded keywords (digitalpoint, digital point, dp, etc.)
  • The top non-branded keyword phrases (non digitalpoint related keywords) bring in over 100,000 visitors per year each.
  • Google is by FAR the #1 search engine referrer, with Bing #2 and Yahoo #3.
  • Search engine traffic came via 956,560 unique keyword phrases.
Click to expand...
Thanks. I'm a bit surprised that it's only 0.1% (especially since the brand is still on #6, #9, and #10), but good job then.

The best things vBSEO does are things we already do internally. Is vBSEO worth the price for most forums? Yes. Is it something that is a good fit for us? No.
Click to expand...
I believe vB changed their URLs even before the optional mod_rewrite, I know vBSEO used to make a huge difference but the impact is now less than it was in the early years. For us it still helps to keep the site high in the SERPS.

BTW - "admin forum" is not a terribly popular keyword phrase (about 12,000 global searches per month). I can't recall any phrase with the word "forum" in it that actually garnered enough traffic to make going after those phrases worth the time. If you are going to spend the time chasing keywords, you would be better off going after "system administration" (301,000 global searches in the last month vs. 12,100 for "admin forum").
Click to expand...
Yeah it was just something that came up to use as example, didn't really investigate the keywords for your niche :)
 
dutchbb said:
Thanks. I'm a bit surprised that it's only 0.1% (especially since the brand is still on #6, #9, and #10), but good job then.
Click to expand...
Yeah... more has to do with there being close to 1 million unique keyword phrases we got traffic from the in the last year. The whole bell curve and all... :)

dutchbb said:
I believe vB changed their URLs even before the optional mod_rewrite, I know vBSEO used to make a huge difference but the impact is now less than it was in the early years. For us it still helps to keep the site high in the SERPS.
Click to expand...
The search engine "friendly" URLs are really just a matter of personal preference. I don't like them personally and I think they are ugly... others think the opposite. While search engines DO put a *tiny* amount of weight on it, it's small enough that for me, it's not worth the ugliness to turn it on. Also, as a programmer myself, I hate that URLs could potentially change by editing the thread (edit the thread title, and all of a sudden you have a different URL for the thread). The threadid is much less prone to change.

In my opinion, the good stuff vBSEO does has more to do with eliminating duplicate content (but since we do that already ourselves, it's pointless for us to use vBSEO. For example how vBulletin generates a unique URL for every post (showthread.php?p=xxx) is completely absurd. We handle that ourselves, so no URL will have p= something in it ever.

dutchbb said:
Yeah it was just something that came up to use as example, didn't really investigate the keywords for your niche :)
Click to expand...
Yeah, we've kind of outgrown chasing or researching any keyword phrases really. Anything we do rank for is completely coincidental. These days we focus more on developing things that are unique/new... if people like them, great... we get a lot of links naturally and in turn rank. If people don't like them and don't link naturally, we failed. :)

Examples:
etc...

...and I'm working on what I think could be (by far) the biggest/most popular thing I've done.
 
Important. Important. VERY Important!

Its not to say that the url structure that xenforo comes packaged with, is bad....Its just that there needs to be a sitemap, an automatic pinger, and the other features that made vbSEO a quality product.
 
You know I think if you dont have vbseo, you wont be able to judge that what is vbseo and how important it is.
I have several vb boards and I have purchased vbseo plugin for all of them, because vbseo is not just a SEO plugin, it has lotf of built in features , besides its has a great support, they even support our vbulletin issues better than vb.com.

I am an vbseo addict and I wont ever move my existing boards to XF if they dont support XF.

I have run my first official website using XF ( a new forum) , and now I can feel what is vbseo !
 
My opinion on vBseo is that its a great plugin with alot of forum enhancements. It comes bundled with alot of little plugins i really like, But i have a hard time wrapping my head around what vBseo really does, I suppose if you are really into SEO and understand it considerably, vBseo would be a fun toy, Ive had a license for over a year now and just finally put it to work a month or two ago.. I dont understand most of it so i cant tell you if it really works.. But to date i havent seen a rise or fall in traffic from SE's Frankly the more i do to my forum in an attempt to increase traffic seems to backfire.. the only tried and true SEO method for me is building links.. So from my own personal experience. I have no need or use for the product here..
---------------------
ETA: Now the vBseo sitemap, that's a whole different story,, I want and need that lil ditty!!
 
I purchased a vbseo license but didn't like it, what i do like is the sitemap generator :)

We need a sitemap generator for xenforo.
 
digitalpoint said:
Also, as a programmer myself, I hate that URLs could potentially change by editing the thread (edit the thread title, and all of a sudden you have a different URL for the thread). The threadid is much less prone to change.
Click to expand...
Excellent point.

digitalpoint said:
In my opinion, the good stuff vBSEO does has more to do with eliminating duplicate content (but since we do that already ourselves, it's pointless for us to use vBSEO. For example how vBulletin generates a unique URL for every post (showthread.php?p=xxx) is completely absurd. We handle that ourselves, so no URL will have p= something in it ever.
Click to expand...
How did you do that?

digitalpoint said:
...and I'm working on what I think could be (by far) the biggest/most popular thing I've done.
Click to expand...
How is that coming along? It sounds interesting...
 
Alfa1 said:
did you do that?
Click to expand...
Anywhere it was practical (basically without adding a SQL query) to not use p= to begin with, we made a plug-ins to alter URL being linked. For all other cases, we made another plug-in that will intercept any showthread.php request with a p=xxx in it, and do a 301 redirect to the right place.

So as an example, vBulletin normally allows a URL like http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=15679779 which can be a duplicate of 20 other pages (one unique URL per post). But on my forum if you go there, internally the system calculates what the *true* URL should be (including page and anchor tag) and does a 301 (permanent) redirect there:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1729716&page=2#post15679779

Alfa1 said:
How is that coming along? It sounds interesting...
Click to expand...
Pretty good... it's being tested on ~100 sites currently. It's an extension of our in-house advertising system. The short version is it allows site owners to sell ad space on their site with a full-blown bidding system (supports banners, email ads, inline keyword based ads, CPM, CPC, geotargetting, the ability for an advertiser to target just a specific area of your site [for example maybe a web hosting company only wants to target a Web Hosting forum on your site], handles things like spend caps on a per ad/account basis, etc.) It's everything we wished AdSense/AdWords would do (or let us do).

Originally we just made it for digitalpoint.com only, and our ad revenue vs. AdSense went up 400% without any additional ad placements. We rebuilt it so digitalpoint.com is really just a site in the system... that way other sites can use it too.

The other cool thing about it is there ends up being zero risk for site owners because you can set your Digital Point Ads to backfill with your AdSense (or any other ad type) when it has no internal ad sold to deliver.

As I said, more or less just testing it now, but you can check it out if you are bored: http://advertising.digitalpoint.com/ For some of the advanced stuff it does, it requires specific platforms along with a plug-in (for example so your site can report the "sections" it has for advertisers to pick from or pull a list of keywords being bid on for the in-line keyword based ads). Currently supported platforms that I've made the addon needed for the advanced stuff is WordPress 2.5 or higher, vBulletin 3/4, MyBB and XenForo. For sites that can't support the advanced stuff, they can still use it for selling banner space just with a JavaScript insertion.
 
digitalpoint said:
Anywhere it was practical (basically without adding a SQL query) to not use p= to begin with, we made a plug-ins to alter URL being linked. For all other cases, we made another plug-in that will intercept any showthread.php request with a p=xxx in it, and do a 301 redirect to the right place.

So as an example, vBulletin normally allows a URL like http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=15679779 which can be a duplicate of 20 other pages (one unique URL per post). But on my forum if you go there, internally the system calculates what the *true* URL should be (including page and anchor tag) and does a 301 (permanent) redirect there:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1729716&page=2#post15679779
Click to expand...
Looks good. Have you added this to their tracker?

digitalpoint said:
Pretty good... it's being tested on ~100 sites currently. It's an extension of our in-house advertising system. The short version is it allows site owners to sell ad space on their site with a full-blown bidding system (supports banners, email ads, inline keyword based ads, CPM, CPC, geotargetting, the ability for an advertiser to target just a specific area of your site [for example maybe a web hosting company only wants to target a Web Hosting forum on your site], handles things like spend caps on a per ad/account basis, etc.) It's everything we wished AdSense/AdWords would do (or let us do).

Originally we just made it for digitalpoint.com only, and our ad revenue vs. AdSense went up 400% without any additional ad placements. We rebuilt it so digitalpoint.com is really just a site in the system... that way other sites can use it too.

The other cool thing about it is there ends up being zero risk for site owners because you can set your Digital Point Ads to backfill with your AdSense (or any other ad type) when it has no internal ad sold to deliver.

As I said, more or less just testing it now, but you can check it out if you are bored: http://advertising.digitalpoint.com/ For some of the advanced stuff it does, it requires specific platforms along with a plug-in (for example so your site can report the "sections" it has for advertisers to pick from or pull a list of keywords being bid on for the in-line keyword based ads). Currently supported platforms that I've made the addon needed for the advanced stuff is WordPress 2.5 or higher, vBulletin 3/4, MyBB and XenForo. For sites that can't support the advanced stuff, they can still use it for selling banner space just with a JavaScript insertion.
Click to expand...
That sounds like an awesome improvement. I never got very positive results with adwords.
Have you thought about expanding this with affiliate network placements? (GAN, CJ, CB, etc) That would be something I would be very interested in. And since no one offers this I cant imagine that it would not be successful.
 
AnthonyCea said:
Not at all, I don't like changing URL structure back and fourth on forums, never did see the logic in it when Google ranks stock vB URL's fine all along.
Click to expand...
Yup, we've never needed it and a vast chunk of our traffic comes from Google searches, with 1.1m pages cached on Google.
 
Alfa1 said:
Looks good. Have you added this to their tracker?
Click to expand...
Nah... kind of getting burnt out on adding things to the tracker that just get ignored. That (for example) is done solely in plug-ins, so I don't need to edit files anyway...

Alfa1 said:
That sounds like an awesome improvement. I never got very positive results with adwords.
Have you thought about expanding this with affiliate network placements? (GAN, CJ, CB, etc) That would be something I would be very interested in. And since no one offers this I cant imagine that it would not be successful.
Click to expand...
It's a system for a site owner to sell advertising on their site. If a site owner wanted to run their own affiliate based ads, they could of course also be an advertiser on their own site. {shrug}
 
anyone noticed the new 'like' feature in vbseo?
biggrin.png
 
dieketzer said:
anyone noticed the new 'like' feature in vbseo?
:D
Click to expand...

Ha!

In answer to the OP: We have/use vBSEO on our main site, and it's been effective for us. If/when we transition to XF though, I really don't see what xFSEO would do for us? Well, stripping out the whitespaces from the html output for browsers that don't support gzip is a marginal benefit, but not worth the overhead IMO.

Given the the fundamental semantic markup of XF, and general content to noise ratio, and the routing competence/capability of the XF platform... ::shrug::

Only thing I'd like is a solid way to map styles to user-agent so we can turn off the jQuery and CSS presentation layers for Search engines. I'd like them to get nothing but the raw, speediest version of the page. It's totally whitehat as that's what the guests see too, but without the prettification that human guests would prefer. :)
 
In my opinion I'd much much rather that these things were part of XF where appropriate rather than a 3rd party add-on.

Whilst vbseo is great it's always something else that needs to be kept updated and compatible when versions change.
 
I voted for:
Not that important (I would not purchase a license)

even if I have a vBseo license. From a developer point of view, the SEO code in Xen is written a zillion times better compared to vBSEO, using one simple rewrite rule based on the current uri. I'm all for supporting a product and its developers, I always was. Unfortunately vBSEO choose the "bloat me to death to make more sales" method, instead of focusing on product performance.
 
Top Bottom