Ran xF Through The SEO-Mill

Xarcell

Well-known member
There is a tool I wanted to share, a "SEO Mill" so-to-speak that I like to use on my sites. I used it to compare forum softwares to see which ones had the lowest amount of SEO issues. Mind you, I only tested the communities of the software, not fresh installs. Either-way, it gives you a "general idea" of which forums have better SEO by default.

The free tool can be found here: http://try.powermapper.com/demo/sortsite.aspx

XenForo: 9%
Invasion Power Board: 9%
vBulletin: 54%
Simple Machines Forum: 18%
MyBB: 9%
phpBB: 90%

I was blown away from the comparison between vBulletin and XenForo.

BTW, I am not affiliated with that site or tool in anyway. I found it via google, and like using it. Also excellent for debugging my template errors or mods. It seems to be very reliable, except for the "spelling errors" part.
 
Can you explain briefly why?
More often than not most SEO programs use outdated information to weight how optimized something is, or they're just blatantly wrong.

SEO is nothing more than best practices, but its been hyped up to such a major buzzword that it's believed to be more important than it is. As long as you follow some of the suggestions, and focus on content, your website will do well.
 
Invasion Power Board: 9%
OMG. Was I the only one worried about the Invasion ?
The attack of the Killer Tomatoes. The Invasion of the Killer Board ?
:)

and focus on content, your website will do well.
In real estate the 3 most important things are: location, location, location.
For internet real estate the 3 most important things are: content, content, content.
 
Can you explain briefly why?
You tested it on different test subjects, IE, one vB forum could have had 5mill posts and rank high for google terms and xenforo.com would not, for example, so the test data is flawed immediately.

Rule #1 of experiments, every test case must be the same, just changing one variable, this case it would be the same community, running different incarnations of forum software.

So my forum with 20,000 posts for example, running xenforo, then tested again running ipb, then tested again running vbulletin, etc.

Even then it is flawed as there are underlying factors such as site age, what google already ranks it, etc etc.

I don't trust these SEO tools anyway, it just ranked my IPB site at 63%, I don't even care. :p
 
Not sure if this was mentioned before but that test goes by Pages with issues %. xF FTW!.

chart


my site is really small and if it weren't for xF I doubt if it would have really picked up anywhere on google. Don't fully trust this test but I know that xF is amazing for SEO :). Who Doesn't?
 
Top Bottom