I have no doubt there are outside sources to explain the differences

Most forums fail within the first few months of opening, so the whole stats continuing to rise just because its new is just wrong. The hardest part is getting the site on its feet with some base members. I know its not much to you, but I had 170 or so members before I installed vBSEO and have only had it running 3 months, but the site is 1 year old. Yes it is young compared to most, but it wasn't installed as it was new, and I had NOWHERE near the amount of traffic I did once vBSEO was installed, both Uniques, SERP conversions, registrations, bounce time, and more. That shows me that people who found the site (on search engines) found more of what they were looking for than before.

You're taking this personally. As a result, emotion is in the way of the numbers. I wish you success. I'm not one to wish failure on anyone.

There is no way in hell a new site can qualify whether it came up in the serps because of content or vBSEO. PERIOD.

There can be definitive proof as to whether vBSEO works when put on established forums. And it shows the stuff don't work. Unless it's a vBSEO team member posting it. Look around the forum circuit, I didn't say that, others have observed it and I'm repeating it.

I compared two forums that I own and work hard. The vBSEO forum failed and the other forum surpassed even some of the forums owned by those who are established in SEO.

I have my proof and it sucks big time to have to realize it. It's a kick in the ass in fact. But hey, that's reality.

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oh bummer, so did you remove vbseo or are you still running it ?

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VBSEO is worth every penny if you know half a shit about SEO and running a forum to begin with.

I rank in the top 5 for Music Forums on a site that has less than 400 members. I outrank well established Music Forums with hundreds of thousands and millions of posts.

My Music Lyrics and Music Video section is growing by the day and I am slowly getting good rankings for all those keywords as well.

I can go on all day giving stats but it won't make a damn difference to someone who has already made up their mind that VBSEO doesn't work. You ask for proof knowing it's not possible to provide solid proof and then you use the fact that no one can provide that proof as reason the product doesn't work.

It's not hard to see that. No, VBSEO will not work for you if you don't want it too. Yes, it will work just fine if you use it to supplement all your other work you put into the site.

Don't even get me started on Joey. Like Rocket said, he just threw VBSEO up and left the site alone. Worked out perfectly for him. Now he can continue to preach how horrible VBSEO to his little minions on vbfaq.

The control forum in my test beat the vBSEO forum's stats in a huge way. I worked them the same way SEO wise. This is not a random sampling. This was a deliberate test and comparison in my case.

Furthermore, the vBSEO test forum was well established and more so than the control forum. The control forum now is past the vBSEO test forum by leaps and bounds with the vBSEO forums stats going steadily backwards for 8 months and the control forum's stats growing.

You think I wanted to fail? You think I just wanted to throw away traffic and revenue? You think I got a grudge for some reason and went out of my way to destroy one of my own forums just to tell people vBSEO didn't work? Let's be real here.

This ain't my first rodeo.

I have had my ups and downs with Joey too. However, ad hominem statements do not negate his numbers. I doubt he's out to get the folks at vBSEO. In fact, if it worked, I know he'd pay. He's not stupid and he's not cheap.

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Heres Month 3 on vBSEO. Previous is the month right before this (Sep15th-Oct15th)


3,180 Visits
Previous: 2,886 (+10.19%)

23,227 Pageviews
Previous: 17,706 (+31.18%)

7.30 Pages/Visit
Previous: 6.14 (+19.05%)

38.81% Bounce Rate
Previous: 36.00% (+7.79%)

00:05:32 Avg. Time on Site
Previous: 00:05:22 (+3.07%)

46.13% % New Visits
Previous: 41.23% (+11.88%)

EDIT: Also, forgot to note that there was a 36 hour period where my site wasn't working this month, so the stats should be higher most likely.

Rocket, frankly out of all them stats the only one that pertains to any likelihood VbSEO is working is the new visits.

However in saying that it is also a loaded conclusion. As the site grows it has more content, more posts, more links and more SERP's. The probability is that regardless of VbSEO you would get more new visits.

I think it is difficult to guage how well it works according to the numbers you have chosen ... I hold little regard for this method to analyse.

I think what would be a better test is the number of posts, pages threads etc indexed by a search engine as a percentile of total posts. What you will find if you do that test it does conclude that VbSEO'd forums have a higher rate or indexation and cache'd pages than those that dont .... the rest is just BS.

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I'd say making it to the first page of Google is good. My site has 250 members, and is competing with forums in the SERPs that have Thousands. That is good enough for me to believe it is working quite well. I would have given a more extensive update, but haven't had time with my classes beating the crap out of me this semester.

My registrations are up, and I guess you can say that this is because a site is new, but like I said before just being new doesn't do anything for you as a forum, just look at how 75% of them fail within the first few months.

Also, My site was pretty stagnant for a few months before installing vBSEO, I install it and get a ton more traffic from SERP's and now its just my site naturally "growing".

I'm in an extremely competitive niche, and making it on the first page for any f-body phrase in Google is success in my book, especially when most other forums are many years older than mine, or have thousands more members and posts.

Roclet, I can understand your enthusiasm and all however.

Comeptition is light, with google search on fbody returning only 98,000 pages and f-body 600,000 pages.

I had a quick look at some of the competitor pages and you're fortunate to have a lot of internet SEO dummies in front and around you. Many have no meta tags and an entry page with no landing script or anything and is just a gateway you click on to enter the site.

Also your forum has done some other simple things like feed in css code etc.

Yes VbSEO helps but not everything that has made the forum succeed is perhaps due to it.

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Public Tree Forum | Free Tree and Green Industry Links
Qualified Brisbane Tree Lopping
Brisbane Tree Care, Consultations and Arborist Reports

F-Body isn't my main focus for a keyword, its a top 10, but I'm looking more for camaro forums, firebird forums for now, and eventually hitting the big "camaro" and "firebird" all together. I'm sure you know that attacking a big keyword isn't always the smartest thing to do right from the get-go. If I was worried about just "camaro" and "firebird" I'd get little to no traffic, with or without a ton of SEO Help. I've analyzed 1000's of different keywords for my site, and I'm looking at ones that are searched often, but not as competitive as others. I figured that to be common sense, but maybe not...


I never said that vBSEO is the ONLY reason my site is working, so I'm not sure where you are getting that from but I will say it is one of the biggest reasons I'm as successful as I am with my forums now. As many people have stated, vBSEO isn't a "miracle modification" that will just by itself make you rank #1 in 3 months for any keyword you want, but has it hurt me? No. Has it helped me? Yes. It's as simple as that. I'm keeping track of my stats looking for significant gains in SERP's and new keywords.

But with that, I will say that other than vBSEO, I've done nothing that any other webmaster couldn't do. Just very basic stuff, so everything in-tune must be doing something right.