vBSEO.com Transition - An Open Letter to Juan Muriente, vBSEO CEO

This whole thing seems rather silly to be honest. Juan is showing as the owner and president. It's his right to do whatever he wants with the company right?
I don't picture vbseo making many sales this last year either, vbulletin has pretty much ruined vbseo and I wouldn't touch a mod for vbulletin 5 with a 10 foot stick.

I've always been a fan of Juan, I've always liked most the other staff members of vbseo as well but Juan has never "done me wrong" and I don't see that starting now. With that said, I'm not running vb or vbseo so really for me it doesn't matter what happens to vbseo. I've moved most my clients away from it when they had those exploits a year ago.

 

This isn't about friendships, Brandon. It's about business.

Where is Juan "showing" as owner and President?

Do you personally condone the business practice of moving on from an operation without telling customers, leaving them without the support they paid for, and never making an announcement as to the plans for the software of the future or the company?

I would be VERY surprised if you said yes.

It's certainly not surprising to me that people he's flown in to see (Mert, you, others), and has had years of friendship with personally, would say that he's never done them wrong. That's the way Juan wins favor. It's a pattern. He's very charismatic. Beyond his business actions and many personal decisions, I like him too. He's a fun guy to hang out with for sure. Get him to take you to a salsa club to show his moves. Impressive!

Unfortunately, as we've seen with Mert's personal experience, it appears to happen when it's convenient. The rest of the time, you may have experienced having your requests stalled (vbh db, interview, etc) and your communications ignored with some excuse... an excuse you'd never make yourself, as you communicate and see your messages online everyday, and would find it impossible to ignore things for weeks and months.

If Juan is communicating with you now, it's because it has become convenient again for him, IMO.

However, if you agree that the business has been run the right way, and you stand behind what's been done, that's a statement about your own business ethics.

I don't mean to poke at you. But I want to make it abundantly clear that a decline in vBulletin's market has nothing to do with the way vBSEO needs to conduct its business.

Business includes the part of the cycle in which you may have to realize that IF you didn't find a new way to monetize, then the business will end.

And when it's going to end, you have responsibilities to your customers, to keep them informed and to do right by them.

This approach might be considered "silly". But there is absolutely nothing silly at all about the state of the company, and the need for intervention.

I personally thank you. I know you are friends with Juan, and it is a testament to your own integrity that you stood aside from any personal feelings of goodwill you have for Juan to allow this discussion to happen.

At the very least, he's acknowledged that he should not be selling the product if he does not plan to support it. There's also awareness. But there will be more to come.

 

What name shows at the patent owner?
What name does it show up as president?

Again, if it is his company (which I believe it is) he can technically do whatever he wants with it.

I've been able to contact Juan for a couple years now if I wanted, eg I have his phone number and we chat here and there.

Everyone has free will, if that's that you believe then there is nothing I'll say to change that.

I didn't say anything with the way business was handled, but you can't honestly say the way vBulletin has "developed" the last few years hasn't hindered the success of vBSEO.

I took care of my clients, I had them removed vbseo for a few reasons, the exploits was the major one.

This family quarrel is what is silly.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the traffic and new members on Admin Talk but in reality this has been presented as a family matter.

I've tried to stay out of this conversation and I've offered a place for discussion to take place.

In reality I like you and Juan equality, it was a shame when you were forced out or left vBSEO but it is what it is. I don't know Illa very well so I really have nothing to look back on with her.

 

I wrote the patent. Juan put his name on it. However, it's irrelevant:

• The patent has nothing to do with the business structure.
• Executive/officer roles such as "President" do not indicate full ownership.
• A patent is zero indication of who owns a company.

If a person owns a business 100%, they can control its direction and spending fully.

Their limitations include:

• What is lawfully permitted
• Violating contracts they create with their customers

FYI - Juan doesn't own this company 100%. It was co-founded and is co-owned with his sister.

I don't believe that "you" would run the business that way.

• If vBulletin's market declined, vBSEO's potential market declines.
• If existing vBSEO customers remove vBSEO, that reduces the number of renewals possible for the future.

That's obvious - and it has nothing to do with the way in which the business has been run.

• If you don't have the resources to provide support, don't offer it.
• If you don't have intentions to continue developing the software, don't suggest that you are.
• If you don't intend to continue operating the business, don't keep the sale page opening, letting new people fall into the trap.
• When you make a sale, you must fulfill the order.
• You can't keep the forum open, if you intend to leave it and never rescue customers with valid requests from trolling users.

You can't do any of those things whether your sales are increasing and you are doing well, or decreasing and pushing you towards business closure.

Sometimes businesses are created by family members. This isn't about showing up late for a baby shower.

Forget for a moment they are related, and then reexamine the grievances.

Thank you. Your forum was chosen because it encourages open discussion. It takes integrity to allow a discussion that is critical of a friend to evolve.

You should know that I don't take offence to your having an opinion that is counter to my own. I appreciate the opportunity to share points of view.

We're similar in that, if we have an opinion or point of view, we stand behind it and defend it. Whether there's a big gap in our thinking or not, that's what ultimately moves a discussion forward.

 

Allow me to add vBSEO is a useless product at this juncture. It's built for an outdated core product which has to be updated due to security flaws. vBSEO itself has more security vulnerabilities and holes than vB4.x ever did. Whatever the motives, and to be clear I couldn't care less what they are, the product itself is a non-starter. The manner in which search engines formulate page rank has changed so drastically that even if the product were fully functional it would be a detriment. Google no longer cares about keywords, hashtags, backlinks, friendly URLs, etc. as they once did. Their algorithm has changed entirely. As a result, sites are far more likely to be flagged or blacklisted for attempting to "cheat" the system than they are to increase visibility. Several highly qualified individuals, including Google's own Director Of Technology have written and spoken extensively on this so you don't need to take my word for it. In order for the product to be of any use to either existing customers or new customers it would have to be completely re-engineered from the research and development stage. And coded. And Alpha tested. And put through QA. And Beta tested. Trying to sell the existing product would be a scam on par with any Juan has allegedly conducted.

 

1. vBSEO does a lot more than rewrite URLs
2. Valid relevant backlinks are still the 3rd or 4th ranking factor in Google rankings
3. Google is cracking down on "spammy" exact match domains but while keywords in domains are less important than previously they still help
4. Friendly URLs still help with ranking in Google as long as they are relevant to the content
5. Using keywords (within reasonable limits) in domains or URLs is not viewed as "cheatring the system" by Google and will not be blacklisted, flagged, or penalized

All of the above has been stated and recently restated by Google spokesmen.

 

That's a lot of information. Granted, SEO is always changing. I don't think that the product has zero value or does things that are detrimental to SEO though. It does require update, and exploring new feature capabilities IF it were to continue. vBSEO was whitehat and never designed to cheat the system. Instead it was designed to work with the system, and make things happen more efficiently. Many of the things you mentioned, Google certainly still takes into consideration within it's algorithms.

 

vBSEO is optimized for the way Google used to calculate page rank. Several years ago. It uses a different algorithm now. By far, the single most important element is original content. The rest of it is negligible by comparison. The reason the algorithm was changed was because of the number of sites using artificial methods of increasing page rank. The new algorithm is designed to flag anything that resembles blackhat SEO which unfortunately includes some whitehat SEO. That means if you look like you're trying too hard to promote content it raises a flag. I had a test site set up for three years where all I did was to try different SEO techniques on original content. It taught me a lot more about how it works than anything else ever has. Google refuses to define exactly how they calculate page rank but they obviously felt like too many people were figuring it out so they changed it. That means any SEO product also has to change to be optimized for the new algorithms.

 

Actually vBSEO's first target was always one thing : URL consistency

That is still as valid as the first day of vBSEO. Djbaxter's comment is more suitable and correct

No one knows the exact algorithm Google uses , we all can only make educated guess's.

For me url & keyword consistency is still very valuable. That's why when we move away from vBulletin we created our own internal SEO tool that will allow boards converted to IPB keep existing structure they had on vBSEO.

 

To this, I agree. Continual adjustment is required. I've been doing SEO stuff for a long time, including blackhat stuff prior to vBSEO. Algos do change. However, Google hasn't shifted its algorithms entirely to a focus on original content, nor made other factors what I would consider negligible.

 

Agree.

Consistency and efficiency should never be underestimated.

 

Before Joe claiming our internal project funded by vBSEO or Crawlability Inc. let me clear that
It is designed for our internal boards needs but we released it on IPB Marketplace to assist boards that want to switch away from vBulletin + vBSEO combination to IPB without loosing any indexed content.

 

I don't know what you're talking about Mert. Who is "our"?

 

Syndication FTW

 

Nah, the vBSEO topic has been officially cancelled by the Fox Network for not being popular enough...

 

Fox? That's the first time I've actually felt offended.

 

He was being generous. It was actually on Reality TV, the network that carries Honey Boo Boo.

 

Update posted. See first post:
http://admin-talk.com/threads/vbseo-com-transition-an-open-letter-to-juan-muriente-vbseo-ceo.43693/