Yes, you are right that content is what Spiders go for. But when your pages are made easier to read by a Spider, the content is listed better, and the keywords are in a .html descriptive page. vBSEO was more than worth the money for my site.

What kind of custom modifications?

AO

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OzChess - Australia's Chess Forum

I'll PM you some details - because I will be off-topic on this thread.

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Syrus XL Media
Digital Port UK - Flash Website Enhancements
LinkShare Live - Link Directory

Thats a good idea.

AO

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OzChess - Australia's Chess Forum

I don't think forums are expensive. If I had to start a brick and mortar business to pay the bills, I'd easily have to dump $30k into a piece of junk "mom and pops" type of coffee shop or whatever.

So, if you look at it that way, the notion of starting a site with vBulletin and Wordpress with a few mods and doing some okay promotions and contests for $5,000 is a TOTAL bargain if you build a long term business.

I think a lot of forum people make forums for fun. While I do think that running a forum is pretty cool, the point for me to run my forums is to gain authority status for the launch of future products. Not everyone will take that stance and therefor a forum will quickly move from being a way to profit to an expensive hobby.

I am trying not to COMPLETELY lose temper here. I want to say some horrendous things to you. I'll hold back.

If you are not knowledgeable on the subject, don't post absolutes. When you back up your reason, actually post something that makes sense.

Of course search engine spiders go for content!!! Do you have any idea what vBSEO actually does? It simply makes it easier for the spiders to get to the content. This is the entire basic premise of onsite SEO and I can't, for the life of me, understand why you would think that vbSEO would be any different.

I switched to vbSEO about 2 months ago. I'd say it's already paid for itself in terms of higher traffic. There is something about knowing that forum post with a Google title can rank for smaller terms that makes it more motivating to spend hours posting on your forum.