I've removed vBSEO from GF for good...

If you don't know what vBSEO is than you can just skip this thread.
For everyone else, I thought I would post a short explanation as to why I removed it.
Some of you might remember our stumble threads that give the forum over 100,000 hits in a matter of a month.
This was the number one reason why I removed vBSEO. It was causing the server to crash and it was either I upgrade to a hosting plan that's 1000% higher than what I pay now, or figure out another solution.
The answer for me was to remove vBSEO. I don't think it's as needed as it once was. It is very handy to have and use to control your forum, but it's just not for me anymore on General-Forums.
I also ran into a problem with the last vBulletin upgrade that was the final cut, it had to go. The problem might not of been completely the fault of vBSEO, but the issue disappeared when I disabled vBSEO so the answer was easy for me..
I've also been working hard on making this site load as fast as possible, we've added some sever stuff to help but the mods and hacks we had on GF was still slowing the site down.
Right now our load time for guest is less than 3 seconds, and it would be less then 1 second if it weren't for the social media badges we have on all pages. (facebook, twitter, stumbleupon)
We've setup 301 redirects for all indexed pages, so we shouldn't see too much fluctuation in search engine traffic over the next 3 months.

We're running the default vb style right now, I'm hoping to have our nice style up within a week but I'll need to tweak it a little so it doesn't slow the site down and ruin what we've been working so hard on this last week.

Anyways, a little rundown of why I removed vBSEO from GF...
Any questions?

 

I have you noticed any change in traffic since you removed vBSEO?

 

It's really to early to tell.
I'm sure we will and I'm sure it'll last a month or longer :ut-oh:
It's something that I needed to do or upgrade to our own server. This site makes a few bucks, but not nowhere close to enough to pay for it's own server each month.
I'll just keep doing what I've always done as far as SEO goes and building links, I'm not that worried about it TBH.

I've been thinking of starting up another posting contest, that will help make up for any search engine traffic we'll lose while being re-indexed.

We already have 1,300 (showthread.php) pages indexed and it's only been 3 days.

 

I wondered where the chat box went........Also, I Googled vBSEO but I still didn't understand what it is....

 

Ya... it stopped working for some reason when we updated friday
we'll get one back up asap

 

You know vB 4 has built in 'pretty' permalinks right? I never seen the point in vBSEO for anything but the rewrite rules.

 

Yes I know but the issue I thought of and it might not be a problem
I want to use a good sitemap generator and I do like the vbseo one, but I'm not sure if it'll send the "pretty urls" to the XML so I stuck with the default setup.

There are a lot of things vbseo does outside the url's that I like, but the performance hit is to much for us.

 

Have you thought about going with a vps? I went from bluehost to ServInt and will never ever go back to a shared host again if I can help it.

 

ServInt was awesome just a tad expensive. I'm now with Wired Tree and am happy thus far (2 weeks in). They're a little cheaper than ServInt.

 

I agree they are a bit pricey, but their support is top notch and absolutely necessary for noobs like myself that do more harm than good when playing around behind the scenes. LOL
I'm glad you find an alternative. Maybe Brandon can use them as well.

 

I have to say Wired Tree's support has been awesome too and they aren't as stuffy as ServInt. The only thing I'm a bit on unhappy with Wired Tree is the fact that you need to buy space for off server backups. ServInt had that included but I'm still spending less per quarter with WT vs. SI.


Brandon: Dunno if it's related to the vBSEO removal but when I click view first unread it's reloading the page then going to the post instead of just skipping down like it should.

 

PS... I have 2 vbseo licenses for sale at 80-85$
updated till jan and sept of 2012

 

ya sure, I'll have to get them from Mike.
he has them on Apache itself, we don't have an .htaccess file in the root

 

Here there are...

Code:

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.general-forums\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [URL]http://general-forums.com/[/URL]$1  [L,R=301]

RewriteRule ^index\.php$ [URL]http://general-forums.com[/URL] [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^forum\.php$ [URL]http://general-forums.com[/URL] [L,R=301]

RewriteRule ^((urllist|sitemap_).*\.(xml|txt)(\.gz)?)$  vbseo_sitemap/vbseo_getsitemap.php?sitemap=$1 [L]

# Attachments
RewriteRule ^members/([0-9]+)-([^/]+)-picture([0-9]+)  attachment.php?attachmentid=$3 [L,R=301]

# Article Rewrites
RewriteRule ^articles/([0-9]+)/$ content.php?r=$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^articles/$ content.php [L,R=301]

# Blog Rewrites
RewriteRule ^blogs/([0-9]+)/([^/]+)-([0-9]+)/$ entry.php?b=$3  [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^blogs/([0-9]+)/$ blog.php?u=$1 [L,R=301]

# Thread Rewrites
RewriteRule ^t([0-9]+)-([0-9]+)/$ showthread.php?t=$1&page=$2  [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^t([0-9]+)/$ showthread.php?t=$1 [L,R=301]

# Forum Rewrites
RewriteRule ^f([0-9]+)-([0-9]+)/$ forumdisplay.php?f=$1&page=$2  [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^f([0-9]+)/$ forumdisplay.php?f=$1 [L,R=301] 

This is how we had our url's setup
general-forums.com/t88273/
for the showthread
general-forums.com/f65/
for the forumdisplay pages

and the blogs and content pages where also short, I don't remember the exact URL off hand

 

As an admin I know I should know this... but I swear it's like Chinese to me!

 

It's simply telling Apache (the web server) to permanently redirect old URLs to new URLs.