I'm running vb 3.8.4 and have been using vbseo for maybe 4 years or so. I wanted to discontinue use of the vbseo and uninstalled it. I struggled on whether I should just let google reindex my forum or redirect from vbseo urls to vb urls. I choose to redirect but now in my WMTools I'm seeing a ton of Duplicate meta descriptions & Duplicate title tags links. Google is looking at my old and new links as duplicates when it's just being redirected. Do you all think I should remove the redirect and just let google reindex everything? I certainly don't want penalized for this. Also should I do a sitemap for my forum? Thanks, Greg Treasure Quest Metal Detecting Forum
Have you checked with the folks over at vBSEO. they are just as helpful with folks leaving as coming.
Can I ask why you moved away from vbSEO? I'm interested to know because I'm a huge fan of SEO and do as much SEO as I can for my forums. I've found that vbSEO is so easy to setup than having to do it myself. I've manually SEO my forums in the past and it's just so much work involved and I would rather use that time working and contributing to my forum more. I'm just interested to know why you discontinue it that's all so something I can think about and have in the back of my mind.
vBSEO makes your forum hypersensitive. If you change a lot of thread titles or section titles, your ranking and crawled amount are affected, I've heard this from Adrian from Internet Brands myself. Their forums have suffered a few times because of that. Check your site map, Greg. Pretty much the thing that makes sense to me.
greg are you using permanent 301 redirects on your server? Do you have a sample of the two urls you can post (i can see if google is caching both)
Unfortunately VB in it's own right will produce duplicate meta titles and decriptions, and that's a benefit of VBSEO. I have both upgraded and downgrading VBSEO sites to and from having VBSEO and have managed fine, though after time. I'd let Google crawl as it is now and not make any more changes until the moment you do a "site:yourdomain.com" in google and find half decent results (about half that of using vbseo). I don't think you'll ever find a happy webmaster tools report though with standard vb. Even my vb4 with SEO URL's reports having around 20% of URL's indexed as having duplicate descriptions - though they still index, and still rank, and still bring traffic to the said websites.
First time I hear something like this. vBSEO 301 redirects moved threads to *minimize* the impact on your rankings, while creating a clear path for crawlers to find the content in the updated location. Would you care to elaborate? Who is Adrian and what is his role in Internet Brands? I don't recall any of the IB techs in charge of maintaining vBSEO on their sites named Adrian.
Hello Nick, did you hear this from Adrian Harris too? Or you assume the "Adrian" Boss is referring to is Adrian Harris. (ps. Nick, you might want to change the default notification type to "Instant email notification" vs. "Weekly email notification" as I just got notified of your response, 3 days later. I've changed this one to instant now!)
No, I did not hear this from Adrian. I'm pretty sure there is only one Adrian with IB that manages communities, so I was confident in who I linked to in my previous post. Too many members get annoyed when they register, make a ton of posts, and then get their inboxes flooded (http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/suggestions-feedback/enoughs-enough-adminaddict-net-spamiming-5424/), which is very understandable. Weekly digest is the best medium to suit both groups (those who don't stick around, and those who do).
Makes sense, now if we could only get a confirmation from Boss that it was actually Adrian Harris who said that. Boss? *ps. not trying to poke, I'm really curious as I've never heard anything like that before*
Something I didn't even think off lol I was about to type up this long winded answer until I saw this.
