Search Engine Friendly URLs

Alright, I'm a newbie in regard to owning a Forum and everything SEO. I noticed the AA Forum has Search Engine Friendly URLs by vBSEO 3.3.0.

Is this "worth it?"

I'm unsure of what the must have SEO "toys" Forums should have.

 

I have heard mixed results. Some people say its must have, while others say its not needed. I will tell you this, it is not required to rank well in google.

There are a lot of forums that rank in the top places in google and do not use a url rewrite tool.

My personal opinion, it helps, and it might help a lot. But, if your site has been online for 2, 3 or 4 years, then I do not recommend that you install it. Google would have to reindex your site with all of the new urls.

From what I heard, the new version of vbulettin is supposed to have a url rewrite feature. If anything, I am going to wait until that is released.

 

Thanks Kevin.

 

Kevin made a good point about the friendly URL change in vBulletin 4. I would probably wait to check that out before you purchase vBSEO.

 

It's certainly not required or even necessary in order to achieve substantial SERPs. My Linnie forum doesn't have any SEO add-on and it's in the top 5 results for its keyword and phrases. The only things beating me are older domains (most of which are static and outdated websites). As soon as my domain gets some years behind it (it's not even two years old) then I think I will be climbing to the top spot.

AA on the other hand probably would have done fine without it. But we are in a tougher niche with a lot of content similar to that of many other sites. I ended up buying vBSEO not because it is required but because 1) It was only $80 (second-hand license) and 2) I have always wanted vBSEO (I love new software "toys" ). I decided that since my Linnie Forum is already ranked very well, there's no need to mess with the SEO so I just installed it here.

I don't regret it at all. It's an amazing add-on and does quite a bit to benefit the forum.

Yes, vB 4 is going to have SE-friendly URLs but that is about it. And that's definitely not what vBSEO is all about -- there is so much more to it. vBSEO is all about link canonicalization and many other optimization techniques, so vB 4's URL rewrite feature isn't going to make vBSEO obsolete at all.
I would still wait though, just to see what kind of results the URL rewrite alone will yield. If it doesn't do anything, then you can consider moving on to vBSEO.

And if you do decide to buy it, please do so through the link in our footer - so you can contribute to our affiliate program account. (It's not set up yet but by the time you purchase it, it will be)

 

I put SEO/SEF on any new forums I install, but one other that I manage which I didn't install, is doing excellent for the keywords that it appears in. I think the lowest is 17. Granted, it's a very specific niche, but considering most people claim you can't rank well without good SEF, it's doing very well.

 

I had the exact same question about vBSEO, is it worth it? In fact, here is my thread from two years ago on vBSEO's forum: Will it be worth it for me? - vBulletin SEO Forums

I took the dive and I would whole-heatedly recommend vBSEO. It does more than simply optimize URL, it can remove whitespaces & comments from your style sheets, reduce the content to code ratio, notify posting services of new content, etc. It really is built around making your content visible and accessible. I compared my pervious vBSEO forum versus my non-vBSEO forum. Here's another vBSEO post:

Of course to be successful you need a multi-pronged approach. Just having vBSEO isn't enough. You should continue website promotion, building backlinks, and in general have people link back to your content.

 

I think if you don't have much serious competition, you're probably ok without it. But if you're duking it out with another forum, you might want to consider taking advantage of every available opportunity.

 

I am with kevin on this one -- vbseo didn't really do anything to help our rankings over a period of months (yes, short timespan I'm aware)

we switched to lighthttpd from apache and stopped using it, it comes with lighthttpd configs but well, the owner never really put it in place

 

SEO friendly urls are much important factor in SEO. I am inspired lot with Kevin's post. Really helpful and much informative. He nicely focused on this factor.

 

I think that friendly url's are very important in SEO. A lot would disagree with it, but it's important.

 

Use 'Postname' URLs, eg: http://exampledotcom/helloworld. This is Google Friendly to use in Blog, site pages.

Regards,
Calvin
RepriseHosting