Reply With Quoteah, I'm not use to complements on this boardOriginally Posted by Joeychgo
Joe I know that you are replying to Minstrel's post here, but may I address the points that I've quoted, please?
I'm sorry but vBSEO is quite obviously not created for every forum owner. The average forum owner, who has already spent $160 on a vB license cannot afford to turn around and spend an additional $140 + on vBSEO.
Speaking from both experience, and what I hear and read from other admins around the net, it's not that they have the money and don't see the point. It's that they (me and many others like me) simply do not have the money to spend. Period. I'll even go a step further and use myself as an example.
I'm a newly divorced (well, a little over a year), mother of 2, trying to get by on child support and a p/t job so that I can be at home when my 6 yr old son (who is a whole nuther story) gets off the bus. I've found a way to make extra $ on the internet (webpage designs and vB styles), so with the help of a friend who donated a license to me, I was able to open my site. While I am doing quite well with my site after only 3 months going, that $ helps me pay my bills. I'm still far from being able to afford $140 + for a vbSEO license.
My point here is...... even if it DOES do all that everyone who supports it says that it does... even if it IS worth the hefty (to me) price tag..... that does absolutely NO good for the average forum owner who simply doesn't have the $ to purchase it.
So please, don't claim that vbSEO is designed for every forum owner. It's designed only for the forum owners who have $. Plain and simple.
/off my soapbox
ah, I'm not use to complements on this board
Why are the google listings low for vbulletin-faq and also no page rank. ?
What are you using for search terms?
Check out http://forums.digitalpoint.com - home page is PR7 - most post pages are PR0. So what? PR reflects the number (and quality) of incoming links pointing to a specific page - individual forum pages, especially the newer ones, are not going to have PR.
As for rankings, see http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...bmaster+forums - note the conspicuous absence of vBSEO.
See also Killing Google PageRank: Making Relevancy Irrelevant
Last edited by minstrel; 10-26-2006 at 07:08 PM.
Hmn! Did not ask about vBSEO. No matter. Google was my question, nothing else.
Just wondering why.
Can we all agree to disagree?
vBSEO is for people of have some extra cash to throw around. I'm in no position to say if it helps or not. If it does great.. If not it's a waste of money.
Exactly. Or I suppose for people who have no idea how to promote and optimize a forum and think spending a lot of cash will do the trick.
The "spending a lot of cash" part happens after you have vBSEO installed and see the results.Exactly. Or I suppose for people who have no idea how to promote and optimize a forum and think spending a lot of cash will do the trick.
Thank you for addressing my concerns via PM... it is much appreciatedThe "spending a lot of cash" part happens after you have vBSEO installed and see the results.
Why are the google listings low for vbulletin-faq and also no page rank. ?
The forum home page is a PR 6. Google is going through some infrastructure changes, and sometimes it shows a PR6 sometimes a PR0, depending on the datacenter your accessing. I pointed this out a week or 2 ago and showed a screenshot of MattCutts bolg having the same problem...
As far as our low ranking, I'll be honest. I just plain dont know. We rank ok in Yahoo (page 2 for "vBulletin" and vbwebmaster.com ranks page 1) and both urls rank page 1 on MSN and page 2 on ask.com. On Google, we are page 4 for vbfaq, and page 3 for vbw. Age of the domains probably causes VBW to be a little ahead of vbfaq.
Last edited by Joeychgo; 10-26-2006 at 09:04 PM.
No thanks required. I enjoyed the topic. Brainstorming is fun.Thank you for addressing my concerns via PM... it is much appreciated
that it isNo thanks required. I enjoyed the topic. Brainstorming is fun.
Joey, I can explain to you why your ranks are low. First, vBulletin out of the box, is not in violation with Google crawling recommandations, because the archive is disabled by default. Google will simply index 10% of the vBulletin dynamic URL's, that's all (see below why).
That's fine with some people, but then Google says:
"Consider creating static copies of dynamic pages. Although the Google index includes dynamic pages, they comprise a small portion of our index. If you suspect that your dynamically generated pages (such as URLs containing question marks) are causing problems for our crawler, you might create static copies of these pages. If you create static copies, don't forget to add your dynamic pages to your robots.txt file to prevent us from treating them as duplicates."
Also, Google says:
"Don't create multiple copies of a page under different URLs. Many sites offer text-only or printer-friendly versions of pages that contain the same content as the corresponding graphic-rich pages. To ensure that your preferred page is included in our search results, you'll need to block duplicates from our spiders using a robots.txt file."
Since you have duplicates all over your site (archive enabled), you get low ranks.
You need to block all your dynamic links in robots.txt, in order to create an efficient SEO vBulletin site. It will take forever to have your archive pages indexed because you block everything in your robots.txt file, leaving only a small door open for the archive link (Mod_rewrite rings a bell?).
Until you do this, your pages will be dropped on a regular basis by Google because you have dynamic URL's upfront, as well the duplicates that hurt a lot your site.
I presume you know that once upon a time, Google actually removed instantly from their indexes any page containing "&id=" in the URL string. However, they changed their behaviour eventually.
I will respecfully ask the following questions:
1. I wonder why WordPress recommends for their permalinks to be friendly?
2. I wonder why Matt Cutts (Google Man) uses Mod_rewrited permalinks/links on his blog, since they don't help with nothing.
3. I wonder why Google recommends to have the dynamic pages disabled and keep only the static pages?
I apreciated the fact that you stated clearly "I don't know why", that proves that you are human, not a God, like other "knowitall" people.
Joey, this is my theory why nothing is posted officially about Mod_rewrite as being recommended for friendly URL's:
If Apache (and other similar server software) are proclaimed as being the recommended software for freindly SEO websites, a WAR between large companies will get started.
If I make server software that is not "SEO compliant", I will say: "Who is Google to tell everyone that my server software is not good? Let's sue their asses."
If you read between the Google lines, you actually see it clearly what they want from you:
1. You need to avoid duplicate links, on your site.
2. Your links need to static, not dynamic.
Simple.
Now Joey, you tell me please what's the easiest way to achieve the above 2 points in a forum/blog in general, using only Apache software (for example)?
You will have your answer to your question, then.
Well, the flaw in your theory is that ALL of my forums raned very well in google until the infrastructure change a few months ago. This includes some HARD keywords such as "Cadillac" and "Mitsubishi Eclipse"
I took some big hits then, BUT, am climbing back up.
Do I know why specifically? No. I have my suspicions, but cant prove anything with enough certainty that I would state it here. This site, I believe, was sandboxed. We didnt appear in the index much at all until a day or two ago, but now are starting to rank well. Coming out of the sandbox wit a page 4 on Google isnt bad whatsoever.
I wrote an article - Duplicate Content and vBulletin Forums that should explain a bit about my position on that subject, specifically the archive.
Matt Cutts doesnt mod-rewrite his blog. You can specify how permalinks appear on a blog. It makes sense to have them use only the title instead of the date, etc.
Reality is, many dynamic sites make it to the top of Google and other Search Engines without the benefit of mod_rewrite. I think its more important to focus on how you construct your linking structure within the site and other on page factors, then whether or not you have a & in your URL.
Fact is, I ahve many many links pointing to static URLs on this site, and still am just now starting to rank. So the dynamic part didnt make a big difference so far as far as ranking goes.
All I ahve seen supporting Mod_rewrite is speculation. All evidence seems to point to mod_rewrite being unecessary. As long as I see stock vBulletin forums ranking well and being indexed heavily, its hard for me to reach the conclusion that Mod_rewrite is necessary.
I have said it many times, and I will say it again. My biggest problem is that many people talk up the mod_rewrite, as you just did. Many inexperienced forum owners come to believe they are taking a magic SEO pill when they purchase vBSEO or use any other mod rewrite product.
AT MOST, I believe that installing Mod_rewrite should be one of the last things you do to improve your search engine rankings. It should be the icing on the cake, not the flour.
What I would like to see is a real study. Take the next 50 vBSEO customers and track their SE rankings over the next 6 months for the main 5 keywords. Dont tell the customers your tracking them, just do it. Then report the results.
Dont want to do the leg work? Ok... Give me the URLs of last 300 sites that installed vBSEO and I will pick 50 at random and do the study, and report the results.
First, I posted extracts from Google site, where they clearly say to use static pages on your site.
I did not invented anything, you can read all the info on the link.
Now, we are talking about Mod_rewrite and why the ranks are low on your site, only.
I don't understand why do you bring vBSEO in this discussion, it has nothing to do with my previous post.
Your robots.txt file is almost empty, no duplication removal of dynamic links is performed, as Google recommends.
Maybe Google enforced the above rules, recently?
You should apply it to your forums, it will not hurt.
There are no studies related to that matter and there will never be, SEO or NO SEO links. The site owner does what he likes with his site, period.
I'm sure Google is not stoopid not to index a site that has 200,000,000 posts, etc.
How many of those links are hold into the Google database, it's hard to tell, I doubt anyone will start counting them, if is not their site.
So what's up with this theory that dynamic sites do better then static? Nobody can prove this or viceversa. But I do listen to Google when they ask me to do something into my site, but that's just me.
Now, Google says that they will not hold them in their index for a long time... so do we believe Google or not?
About the Mod_rewrite, yes it's speculation only, nothing official anywhere (I posted my theory). But will it hurt to make it happen if it could help your site, even with 1%? It will definitelly not hurt, right?
"Matt Cutts doesnt mod-rewrite his blog. You can specify how permalinks appear on a blog. It makes sense to have them use only the title instead of the date, etc."
How do you know for sure? We are both right here. But he still uses friendly URL's... why?
In his videos he recommends using Mod_rewrite, so I presume he does it for his site also?
Video #4 - Static vs. Dynamic URLs
"Does Google treat static and dynamic URLs differently? Matt says generally (remember my theory) they are treated the same way in terms of ranking. He says pagerank flows to dynamic URLs in the same way as to static URLs. He refers specifically though to an example URL from the website of the person asking the question which has 5 parameters and in response to this he says you can use too many parameters. Matt says it’s best to stick with 2 or 3 parameters at most and to avoid long numbers as Google can think they are session IDs. He also mentions using mod_rewrite if you think you may have problem (dynamic) URLs."
And you still did not answered to my question:
Also, just tell me why Google recommends to have the dynamic pages disabled and keep only the static pages?If you read between the Google lines, you actually see it clearly what they want from you:
1. You need to avoid duplicate links, on your site.
2. Your links need to static, not dynamic.
Simple.
Now Joey, you tell me please what's the easiest way to achieve the above 2 points in a forum/blog in general, using only Apache software (for example)?
I totally agree about life being difficult for some. It's like saying, "Hey Floren, why did you buy a Mazda? There are plenty of Mercedes out there..."
My Mazda will drive me pretty well too (even after 5years), I don't have money for a Mercedes.
That does not mean Mazda is a better car then Mercedes, or I would not like to own a Mercedes...
However, did you noticed that many people are obtuze, related to spending money on Internet products or monthly bills (why spend 5$/month for voice mail on my phone when I can buy an answer machine instead)? They complain about spending 200$/year on an host for example, but they deliberately spend thousands of dollars on useless clothing, fastfood, sugar stuff, etc., products that are not needed for your body and make your life unhealthy.
Water is free and healthier, but we buy hundreds of bottles of Coke... Where is the logic on that?
The human mind is set to one standard, the Internet is a freezone and everything on it it should be also free.
When people will stop thinking like that, then they will realize that Internet products have more value then the rain coat I just purchased, because it has a nicer color compared to the brand new one I still have in the closet...
We want to make a lot of money on the Internet, without investing a single dime in return, or to improve our webmaster skills without proper training, purchased books or related software.
That's never going to happen.
Yeah well, I can tell you for certain that I don't spend $ on Coke, useless clothes, fast food or candy. I don't have it to spend
I'm also not of the mindset that everything on the internet should be free. If I was, I wouldn't have spent $160 for a vB license. Further, I think that anyone who is of the mindset that everything on the internet should be free, wouldn't have purchased either of the vB licenses. AGAIN... the value of the product is not in question, in my post. So really, to me, your reply to my post above is a moot point.
If you are going to post this, then you should also note that both of us have re-evaluated vbseo and are using it again.
Minstrel - Why the hell do you have to continue harping on how it can be done for free? What does that have to do with anything? I go to the grocery store and buy all kinds of food that other people grow. Why? because it is a convenience. I could grow it all by myself and not have to pay anybody else for it. So it wrong in your mind to by groceries?
Joey - you continue to harp on vbseo as a mod rewrite, when this software has advance so far beyond that stage that is makes you comments completely pathetic at this point.
I will never, for the life of me, understand why people condemn a product because it isn't free. Since when is everything in the World supposed to be handed to you for free?
In addition, the company, Crawlability, makes a press release, and immediately you got Minstrel tripping over things in his house to get to his computer so he can start in on negative comments about it.
I can understand people not wanting a product, and choosing to not purchase it. But why some of you have gone on a crusade, preaching against it, really makes no sense. At this point, it is comical how you guys (mainly Joey and minstrel), act like they have all the answers on why you shouldn't use the product, when you most likely dont know anything about it, and have never tested it.
My post was not adressed directly to you, Ohiosweetheart.Yeah well, I can tell you for certain that I don't spend $ on Coke, useless clothes, fast food or candy. I don't have it to spend
I'm also not of the mindset that everything on the internet should be free. If I was, I wouldn't have spent $160 for a vB license. Further, I think that anyone who is of the mindset that everything on the internet should be free, wouldn't have purchased either of the vB licenses. AGAIN... the value of the product is not in question, in my post. So really, to me, your reply to my post above is a moot point.
I respect you a lot for your post and I know that you pass through difficult times, as we speak.
Taking care of your kids is not an easy task when money are short.
I wish you all the best with your website income, you deserve much more then that.
About the post, I was highlighting what some (most IMO) people think about buying web developed software.
I dont condemn the product because it isnt free. At this time, I dont recommend ANY mod_rewrite product, paid or free. I have said this over and over again. I have no issue with the cost of vBSEO.
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