There are some things that I miss with vBSEO that I was wondering if we can hard code them into our templates/files. I know I'm not very smart with this stuff so I hope someone is up to the challenge.

 

1. Relevant replacements - I think these were the best thing ever.

 

2. Virtual HTML Display

 

3. Clean up html

 

Also, I really liked briansol's guide to setting up vBSEO and would like a similar format to the URL's that he set up (which is pretty similar to how vbseo's url's are now I believe). Just wondering if that's possible with IPB's FURL. Please note, I'm in the conversion process as we speak so I haven't had the time to check it out :/ Just figured I would try to get some answers now before I get the chance to dive into the ACP and spend the day getting everything how I want it.

 

Thanks guys.

Personally, I would be incredibly wary of "Virtual HTML". This is where vBSEO replaces certain sections of text with dynamic javascript to cloak it from search engines. In my view, that is flawed because search engines parse and run javascript anyway to detect cloaked HTML and may penalize your ranking for doing so.

 

Just a thought. :) I see elsewhere you say Bob's blog on switching to Invision Community Forum and that he's seen a rise in traffic since the switch. That tells me that maybe Google is wise to tricks that vBSEO employ. Either way, it proves that such measures aren't required for good placement.

About FURLs. you can change them but you need to edit some core files.

You can change the FURLs if you wanted to, but really there is little point. The structure is proven to be spiderable. Adding ".html" at the end is almost pointless in this day and age as most of the internet is dynamically generated and Google knows this. Moving keywords around, etc has never been proven to substantially increase your ranking.

I noticed that the relevancy of the threads listed in SE's is better than it was when I used the replacements from vbSEO. I can't explain it yet, but, I have noticed traffic from terms that I never seen before. I am starting to think the problem was that the replacements were picked up and some parts of the posts were discarded because of it.

 

To be sure there isn't anything I miss or need from vbSEO.

Is there anything special you did when you converted? Various template or file edits to help with SEO?

The only 2 edits I did was to add a guest welcome message to the board index and added rewrite rules to htaccess to redirect the old vbseo urls back to the default vbulletin urls so that ipb could redirect them to the ipb urls.

When I first converted, I was really pushing for Crawlability to consider doing an SEO script for IPB. After four months IPB use, I'm no longer interested.

 

I think there was a time and a place for vBSEO. I think search engines have evolved to a point where it is no longer necessary. Someone asked on another forum if anyone felt vBSEO was worth the price. My suggestion was to add another 99¢ and purchase IPB, instead.