With the coming of vb4 and seo friendly urls, will vbseo really be needed anymore? Will the URL structure be changeable in the admincp and have as many features as vbseo? What are your thoughts on this, the second question is for anyone able to answer it I am hoping with upgrading to vb4 that it wont be needed any more as there are mods out there to do canonicals etc It really seems to me the seo urls are the only thing left or at least what I really care about myself.
vBSEO is about a lot more than just SEO friendly URLs. From what I've seen, vBSEO will be just as handy in vB 4 as it was in vB 3.
I agree with the above. I also don't like the URLs that are on the vB forum right now. Can they be changed in the Admin CP like you can modify the vBSEO ones? I don't remember.
What are some of the other features that you feel warrant people paying for? Keep in mind, I'm a vBSEO license holder for my WDBoards.com site, but I'm not sure that I want to purchase additional licenses for my other sites just yet. Thoughts?
vBSEO used to do a good job for what it was made for. I don't think they still do from not only recent changes in vBulletin, but from the fact that search engines have evolved, making a lot of their features moot and useless. I think if you have it, you might as well keep using it. But its not something I'd rush out and buy thinking its going to make your site any more of a SEO success with or without it. As a matter of fact, its been on this one domain I own since the inception of the site, I'm about to remove it and see how it goes.
While plenty of vBSEO features are being added into the new default vB4, I think there is still good reason to continue to use the software. vBSEO automatically removes white spacing afterall! According to another Brian post, vB4 only rewrites forumdisplay, showthread and member pages while vBSEO rewrites all vB pages, even custom ones.
I think we will be sticking with it then. It's a shame they dont roll out a whole vbseo like solution, it would certainly make the suite more of a suite and well and truly worth paying for.
So, would we equate (on a much larger scale, of course) the 'features' as follows.... The 'features' in vB4.0's built-in SEO to be to vBSEO as the built-in albums 'feature' in vB is to something like Photopost or Photoplog? In other words, are we simply getting the very tip of the iceberg of a feature while the other solution is the iceberg with a cherry on top?
Really if you want the standard basics of SEO, what 90% of the people use, than vBulletin 4.0 will fulfill your needs. This includes less duplicate content, better URLs, Sitemap Generation and Submission, semantic layout with better use of heading tags. If you want more than vBSEO will be for you. Even then, you'll probably do your own SEO tweaks if you're hard core into getting listed at the top of your keywords.
I show it as an accepted feature and it is marked as "implemented" but it isn't "Code complete" yet or included in the distributed package.
Contact vBSEO and get the rewrite rules that will redirect their format back to standard vBulletin format (showthread.php?t=2525). Then if you use vBulletin's rewrite it should take care of the rest.
Personally I didn't care to use vbseo since it added much more server load (per reports) for larger boards and it's an encoded script which I didn't want to depend upon. If you're going to move to vb4 or any other relatively decent SEOed script, I think that vbseo now provides a marginal return on a very large and branded investment (you're paying $130 and have to put their link on the bottom of every page?) Those guys do a great job of turning on the hype machine. With regard to removing SEO, they have their method but I don't think it provides a 301 redirect for every URL, which could end up being a massive amount of URLs. I wondered how vB 4's upgrade is supposed to handle a move - will new URLs just be spat out for search engines to reindex? Is there some sort of way to have a full 301 redirect list that is actually useful?
