Which features of vBSEO are missing in XF?

Razasharp

Well-known member
If any? And if there are any, are they available as plug-ins?

I am thinking about installing vBSEO for my big board _or_ switching to XF, and wondered which has the best SEO features.

Has anyone moved a vB forum with vBSEO to XF - how did it go? Anyone else got any thoughts on the topic?
 
Thanks for the reply.

One of the thing that concerns me is that I've seen a few vB sites (some with vbseo and some custom sef urls etc) with thousands of online visitors/guests, yet, I looked at IGN's (XF) forum and they only had around 500 (yet they have significantly more members/threads/posts). Visitors are usually a fairly good indication of SE traffic imo - and so I'm wondering whether something's missing : /
 
Seo is build in in XF. And it works well.
After switching you will have to wait some time to reach your old positions in google.
 
Honestly, vBSEO is all hype and not enough action.

I help convert another site away from vBulletin Suite with vbSEO and their traffic and SEO rating jumped after moving to XenForo.

A lot of what vbSEO can do, so can XenForo either alone or with a few good placed add-ons.

As for customized urls beyond normal friendly url .... Everything can be done via .htaccess and as such, save you a lot of load and resources.
 
Thanks for the reply.

One of the thing that concerns me is that I've seen a few vB sites (some with vbseo and some custom sef urls etc) with thousands of online visitors/guests, yet, I looked at IGN's (XF) forum and they only had around 500 (yet they have significantly more members/threads/posts). Visitors are usually a fairly good indication of SE traffic imo - and so I'm wondering whether something's missing : /

90% of SEO is content and the links pointing to that content. Optimization is just the other 10% - it's not going to make a massive difference unless your setup is terribly flawed. And as far I can see, XF is actually better than vB SEO in that regard. For example, if you look at the raw HTML, the header area is actually below all of the content - so Google sees the keywords you're trying to rank for on a particular page before it parses through the sitewide links at the top.

Comparing online visitors is a flawed metric btw because you can change the cookie timeout value. I've seen some sites set it to like 5 hours so it makes their forum look more active.

Seo is build in in XF. And it works well.
After switching you will have to wait some time to reach your old positions in google.

Was instant for us... I never noticed a ranking drop.
 
Thanks for the replies. I think it would be nice to have things like pingbacks/trackbacks - would be cool to see those on XF too.
 
I've done some extensive checking and my SEO is as good or better since moving from my old forum (EE) to XF. EE was sorta plain vanilla so never got in the way of "natural" SEO.

I'd be glad to share the figures and charts so far - but in general I am seeing a 10-25% growth in goog organic search over one year ago. This is with almost no change in site content.
 
Take my word: I moved from vBSEO + vB to XenForo and XF alone kicks ass! It takes some time ( ~ 6 - 8 months ) for a medium sized website to recover from the traffic drop, but the site just skyrockets afterwords. The most important thing is that people love the new software.
 
Has anyone moved a vB forum with vBSEO to XF - how did it go? Anyone else got any thoughts on the topic?
Yes, I did for one client. It requires a fair amount of rewrite rules in Nginx, if you do not want to lose any links in Google. I did not used the redirection scripts provided by XF, they are not needed in Nginx. No idea how it can be done with Apache... vBSEO has a crazy SEO structure, scattered all over the places.
Fact: You will not lose any links on Google, coming from vBSEO to XF. (forums, threads, members, etc.)
It takes some time ( ~ 6 - 8 months ) for a medium sized website to recover from the traffic drop.
I had zero links dropped on Google, with the 301's implemented in Nginx.
Example of old vBSEO link (still in Google search), properly redirected:
http://www.thcfarmer.com/forums/f62/larry-og-kush-16000/index9.html
 
Linkbacks, pingbacks, refbacks,

I'd be 100% ok with never seeing those in xenForo. One of the first things I disable (except outgoing) when I used to install vBSEO. That and the Like system.

Of all the major forum networks out there that run vBSEO, I haven't found a single one that used any of those features.
 
Linkbacks, pingbacks, refbacks,
They will be redirected to new XF format.
One thing I really liked about VBSEO was how they made some things stupid simple to tweak.
I don't agree. Personally, I think customizing the URL's per client behavior makes the import to another forum software a real nightmare. I'm glad XF does not allow custom URL formats, they are useless IMO.
 
I'd be 100% ok with never seeing those in xenForo. One of the first things I disable (except outgoing) when I used to install vBSEO. That and the Like system.

Of all the major forum networks out there that run vBSEO, I haven't found a single one that used any of those features.

I like it because it helps to see who is copying-n-pasting your content or talking about the same subject. There should at least be a usergroup permission for it. *shrugs*
They will be redirected to new XF format.

I don't agree. Personally, I think customizing the URL's to a specific format makes the import to another forum software a real nightmare. I'm glad XF does not allow custom URL formats, they are useless IMO.

What are you talking about?
 
Oh okay. Just mentioned them because they are the only vbSEO features I'm interested in.
 
Was instant for us... I never noticed a ranking drop.
Same result here. No redirection, no hard directs, nothing. CODForums soared.

As of right now, we're getting more spam than ever before. Even on vB3 or vB4. And that's saying something.

My visits also took a hit, and I've been diligently removing spam from actual profiles, and then banning them. We used to be getting around 50 to 80 average users online at once. The max average I've gotten was 100. The best day was 130/140 online at once.

:censored:
 
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