Will upgrading to vBulletin 5 Kill your traffic??

I saw a user complaining on vb.com about his traffic tanking after upgrading to vBulletin 5.

This is rather disturbing, sure there may be other factors involved but the fact is the upgrade happen on June 28th, right around the time his traffic went away..

This is in the vbulletin 5 forums so I obviously can't comment on it there, but I thought we could bring it over here for general discussion.

 

I tend to agree but I could see how someone who doesn't visit the forums "or other admin type forums which aren't censored" and seeing how vBulletin claims 5 is ready for production, would overlook the terrible state vb5 is in.

 

Well, they use a ton of AJAX for page views (like going to page 2 of things), so it's not surprising you see a huge drop in pageviews and a rise in time online.

There's so much simple stuff the vB devs haven't figured out yet, I'll assume they haven't figured out how to incorporate Google Analytics for AJAX requests.

That being said, from personal experience, vB5 does lead to less users returning to the site simply because things don't work and it's slow (the reason I use vbulletin.com less is because of exactly that).

 

vB5 doesn't cause a drop in site traffic or SEO unless you happened to use some kind of modification which altered the original URLs, like vBSEO, for instance. The drop in traffic on certain sites is caused by the URLs being reverted to their original format which breaks the links on search engines. That's not vBulletin's fault.

 

The user said he didn't have vbseo installed and all he did was upgrade from vbulletin 4.

no comment..

 

Very true

 

I've done the same thing for several forums (4.2.1 to 5.0) and none of them have had a drop in activity.
There has to be another explanation other than the core software being the issue.

 

Did you say the same thing about vB4? Because yes, it did cause a drop in site traffic. I upgraded my vB3 to vB4, I had already installed GA/other google/yahoo stuff to help watch the traffic stats. I had already installed and upgraded vBSEO - ALL traffic dropped. It didn't help matters that every time I upgraded to a new version of vB4 parts of the site broke, therefore hurting my SEO more, and more and more. To the point there were no users online, no users posting, some members complaining about functionality.

IT IS vBulletin's fault.

They didn't have to change URL semantics, but they wanted to reduce the costs of buying vBSEO so they did it themselves (the cheap way, the cutting corners way). It would have been great if IB had just bought vBSEO and have them improve SEO.

With vB5, they changed again, rather than keeping the old vB4 URL semantics, they took it further by altering where the "Forum" section goes, where the "activity stream" goes, where this and that goes. It's confusing - and was not designed with SEO in mind.

I liked some of the things they were doing - like commenting on the actual post. That was pretty nice - something refreshing. That's not enough to spend $300 on. I want a quality software, not a Facebook knockoff.

 

Was Carlos banned, his name is crossed out

 

Something had to of happened to the url structure in order for his organic search traffic to crash like that. Whether it be an seo addon or maybe an extra "?" somewhere in the url could have done it. I think maybe he isn't providing all the details of the situation. It could also be that he was penalized from google for something else, maybe backlink spam, or keyword stuffing, or identified as a link farm, or identified as an article farm, Slower loading than google likes, maybe even a slightly different hierarchy causing some of the older pages to 404, etc... There's lots of different variables at play when it comes to google. If nothing truly changes with the url structure, then we would have to look at penalty's as part of the equation.

Just hard to say without actually dissecting all the real details of his situation,

Eric Lyon

 

Yes, he keeps arguing with me via PM and I don't have time to monitor his actions 24/7.
He was recently banned for similar issues a month or two ago and I was trying to be nice to let him back in, seems some people never change.
</offtopic>

 

This is what I'm wondering. What am I doing that they aren't? Or what are they doing that I'm not? There's no consistency. It affects one site but not another one. Why?

 

I am deeply sorry for the upcoming comments about your post but i can't resist

The issue has 0 relevance with vBSEO at all. It is directly related to vBulletin.

If you have painfully slow loading pages , no script in the world can resolve your SEO issues.
if you use that much unnecessary ajax on every page load and bloat the page size with unnecessary information , no script will assist your rankings.

Additionally with or without vBSEO , the situation vBulletin 5 is complete disaster, The first day i heard about remapping existing urls , i warned all vBulletin users not to upgrade their board until vBulletin fix that stupid system.

If you are an established site and you change your existing url structure no matter what you do , you'll get slammed by Google. That is the reality .

vBulletin 5 is possibly the worst planned script ever a company released on internet.

 

vB4 did change the URL structure depending upon the settings one used to set it up.

What vB5 has done is to go to a node structure as opposed to a "friendly URL" structure

I don't have painfully slow loading pages on any of the vB5 sites I administrate. Yes, the AJAX is an issue. They need to remove the javascript bloat. It definitely slows down the site compared with straight php. But not to the extent some claim, at least not in my experience. Yes, changing URL structure is a traffic killer. If I had to guess, and I do since I don;t know the facts, I'd venture those using friendly URLs and attempting to upgrade to vB5 are experiencing problems. I never use friendly URLs. I've always used standard canonical URLs and not had those issues. Another thing I've discovered from experience is that sites with databases over a certain size don't take kindly to upgrades. I'm not certain what you mean by "remapping" URLs. Perhaps you're referring to the showthread.php script being replaced with nodes?

 

And yet you stıll comment lıke a master on SEO

Your posts clearly hıghlıght that you are just a rookıe forum admın and yet you are tryıng to teach many experienced forum admins on how to manage their board.

You simply don't even know the major change within vBulletin 5 and yet still comment about it.
Good for you maybe but bad for people who may read your advise and find them self within the vBulletin 5 drama...