Is it worth to purchase vBSEO to make your vBulletin search engine friendly???
It costs so much money to buy a vBSEO license, I wonder whether or not it is worth it?
Did you notice an increase of search engine referrals when you installed vBSEO?

No. Vbulletin is search engine friendly already. Plus if your forums grow larger vbseo will kill your server as it is not as efficient as regular vb. Plus, if they stop making vbseo you're screwed because all of your urls will need to change to go back to regula vbulletin.

I disagree completely.

Please tell me how vBulletin is even close to SEO friendly out of the box? Is SEO friendly multiple urls pointing to the same content? For example, showthread.php?t=xxxx or showthread.php?p=xxxx? Which one does google use? Do they use the p= or t=? They go to the exact same thing. Also what about that archive? Which one does Google rank? The real thread or the stripped down hideous one? Which one do you want your visitors to find? Spend a lot of time/money making a nice forum with a good style only to have your visitors land in the 1990's with a vanilla display of the thread? What about vBulletin having multiple urls within the software itself that causes search engines to be sent to domain.com/, domain.com/index.php, and domain.com/index.php? ? Then what about the fact that no one ever implements a 301 redirect to either www.domain or just domain.com? Instead now they have people linking to index.php? index.php and just the root /. Throw in the variations of non www or www and now you have enough urls to get to the same page to make a search engine go crazy. So their less than perfect algorithms or left to decide which one of your pages is the best to show and what url they transfer link weight to. Do they transfer the link weight to p= or t=? / index.php? or index.php ? Once they decide on that then do they show the actual thread with all those confusing different urls or do they show the archive page with just one simple url? You wonder why the archive indexes better most of the time? One url, one thread.

I could go on and on. Showpost.php, printthread.php..... why allow a single post to be accessed by itself? Why not use an anchor for that post so the url ends up domain.com/topic1/#post3325? Google strips that anchor our when it indexes your url resulting in link weight passed to the whole thread BUT the user still gets to use that url to link to that individual post. The result? A SEO friendly, user friendly forum.

Using VBSEO's linkbacks will show you how many urls can access a vBulletin thread. I get links from stock vBulletin sites all the time. Duplicate links. Someone clicks on the url and its t=, then someone accesses the page from the newpost feature and they get the p=. Then throw in the session ids that I get and it makes for a lovely mess to sort through and remove all the duplicates and just keep the t= in the menu.

Now throw in the fact that probably 90% of the people don't bother to monetize their archive, because really who goes to the archives? Surely not all the SEO traffic that your archives get by ranking better than the actual thread. So not only are you hurting your SEO you are losing money as well.

There is a lot of discussion about vBulletin SEO. These particular threads are helpful in explaining what is wrong with vBulletin out of the box:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3133336.htm
http://www.vbulletinzone.com/t9/

This is something I have been following for a few years now. I run VBSEO on all my forums and will never run a vBulletin forum without.

And why would I have to change all my urls back to the default if they stopped making VBSEO? On top of that my server load has changed very little, can't even be noticed, from before and after. VBSEO is very optimized. Some of the biggest forums on the net use it with no problem.

I didn't say it was perfect out of the box, but it most certainly is search engine friendly. And considering that a simple robots.txt and/or .htaccess file can solve the majority of issues you raised (maybe even all of them) it makes it hard to justify the cost and potential risks with using vbseo.

Robots.txt doesn't solve the multiple urls to the same thread problem. If people are still linking to showthread.php?p= and showthread.php?t= among the new post links then you are losing valuable link weight.

I don't see what "risks" you are talking about. It's been running on my site for over a year and I have not had any problems that weren't fix quickly by the staff. If you want to make sure that it is done right then you buy VBSEO, where you pay not only for the software but for the research into optimizing vBulletin the most you can for the major search engines.

The biggest risk is what happens if they stop making it? It's not a Jelsoft product so it isn't as stable as they are. If they stop making it, anyone using it is either stuck with their current version of vbseo or you take a huge SEO hit and switch back to regular vbulletin.

Also, it doesn't work well for larger and more popular communities. It requires more server resources then regular vbulletin so if your site gets to be popular, which is everyone's goal, you run the risk of outgrowing it.

The biggest risk is what happens if they stop making it? It's not a Jelsoft product so it isn't as stable as they are. If they stop making it, anyone using it is either stuck with their current version of vbseo or you take a huge SEO hit and switch back to regular vbulletin.[/quote]

That's not something I see happening at all. If it does then it happens. Frankly it sure beats living in a dynamic, duplicate url & duplicate content world. They always say the bigger the risk the bigger the reward.

Of course it is going to require more. However more does not equal excessive. It's nothing that will kill a server setup that a big board should have. I've had 1000 people on my site before, due to a mainpage at netscape, constantly hitting my forum and my server did fine.

I would never use vBSEO simply because it's not open source, and I want to know what code is running on my machine.

and that is a valid reason as any I have seen and I can understand that.

You talk about duplicate content being a big reason why you use vbseo. Well, Vanessa Fox and Matt Cutts both just agreed it is not an issue. That makes the perceived value of vbseo significantly less. Would you agree that significantly reduces the justification and risk of using vbseo?