vBSEO: When to Install and How it Is Effective

vBSEO is the most important and most effective add-on for the vBulletin forum software. Now, the creators will tell you that you should install it on your board as early as possible, if not before you even release it to the public. However, in my own experience, its better to let your board start for at least 6 months, if not a year, and then install it. You might be puzzled by this, but trust me, its more effective. Allowing your forum the time to build indexed pages of normal vbulletin URLs, will double your indexed pages once you install vBSEO. I had about 10,000 pages indexed on google when I originally installed vBSEO on one of my boards. In a matter of 2 days, those 10,000 turned into 14,000. That's a good forty percent increase.

Once again, you may be puzzled as to how vBSEO can cause such a substantial increase in such a short amount of time. This is because of vBSEO's ping to google and other major search engines. When a new thread or post is made, search engines are immediately notified and bots are sent to your site to index those pages. However, those bots stick around and can quickly index hundreds of other pages in a matter of hours. The major reason they can able to index and move through your board so quickly is because of how vBSEO rewrites your URLs.

A normal vBulletin url will look like this: http://forums.gametrailers.com/showthread.php?p=4959570

A vBSEOed URL will look like this: http://joindiscussion.com/general-off-topic/5406-bill-gates.html

Notice the use of keywords and dashes in the vBSEOed .html URL, compared to the showthread.php auto generated variable URL that vBulletin creates. Those keywords are extremely important in receiving high page ranks for certain keywords.

Finally, one of the greatest tools to effectively get your pages indexed quickly, is the use of rel="nofollow" to stop search engine bots from following external links to other sites. By trapping the bots on your site, they can index more pages quickly and efficiently.

Hopefully this article has shed some light on vBSEO for you. If you are a semi-experienced administrator it may convinced you to buy the software. If you're new to vBulletin, hopefully it'll help you in the future when your forum is ready for vBSEO.

If you're a administrator who runs a forum about vBulletin or just a webmaster forum, check out the vBSEO affiliate program.

As always, come back tomorrow for more tips and tricks to improve your forum and make money online.