vBulletin + vBSEO -> IP.Board?

I'd be interested in hearing some results as well. vBSEO is one of the biggest reasons I'm avoiding (or at least holding off on) making the switch away from vBulletin.

 

Brent, my 'large' site is ~1760 members and ~55,600 posts.

I've tracked some numbers on that site for the last 2.5 years and search engine traffic is one number I've watched.

I've seen regular variations in search engine traffic of 2% - 3% since I started recording the numbers, so I've always looked for subsequent months of any movement to qualify an increase or decrease in traffic. If traffic was up 3% in April and another 3% in May, then I would consider that as a valid increase.

I've only had this particular site running on IPB for about 7 weeks. Before that, I was running vB 3.8.4 with vBSEO. Two weeks after the conversion, I saw a 5% drop in search engine traffic. Within 2 weeks of that, the site had recovered ~3% of that drop and last week I noted the number was back within 1% of where it was prior to the conversion.

But here's the kicker. My original intent was to redirect the vBSEO URLs, as Bob mentioned in your thread on the vBSEO site. After a couple days, I eliminated the redirects and went cold-turkey. I wanted to see what happened. You never know unless you try, right? The vB site was in a forum directory and the IPB site is at root, so everything is different. I've since installed MinervaSEO and have done some template edits to eliminate the forum name from what we would call forumdisplay and showthread in vB. And the site is hanging right in there.

One of my keywords had been ranking 5th (of ~7,300,000) for the last 6 months or so. For the last two weeks, it has been 4th.

I would like to see Crawlability develop a script for IPB. If they do, I'll be on it before anyone else. But if they decide to avoid IPB, I'm not going to shed a tear over it.

I hope this information helps.

 

I've moved WDBuddies.com from a social networking script (which didn't have much in the way of indexed pages) and am about to launch the site in a couple of weeks .... WDBuddies.com - Where Disney Fans Become Disney Friends

So, I'll be sure to see an increase. Although, if IPBSEO is developed, I'd be very interested as well.

IPB has a gallery option, but not sure if you're looking to go that route or not.

 

Nice post Mike!

ooo look forward to watching the progress. :nailbite:

 

Andy was queuing up to purchase an IPB license today, as well. The vBGeek is checking things out, too. There are some serious and long-time vB license holders making the switch of late. As Brandon mentioned earlier on Twitter, even some of the vB fanboys are bailing on vB.

And it certainly doesn't seem the sales of IPB licenses is slowing down any. And when I saw IPB was releasing a converter for vB4 this morning, that spoke volumes. Can you imagine people upgrading to vB4 and already converting to IPB after so short a time?

 

That is incredible.