Cormac Moylan

A week ago I installed VBSEO on the Blaa.ie forum. Actually, I didn’t install it…the VBSEO support had to do it because of complications.

VBSEO is a tool which attempts to improve your ranking and hits for VBulletin. It costs a pretty penny. So does it seem worth it?

I’m not convinced by it at all to be honest.

First of all be careful when installing VBSEO. There are two different versions Ioncube and Zend. I had a quick look around the forums to see if there was any difference in either of these and i couldn’t find anything. So i downloaded Zend. After I installed it I found my forum was down.

It turns out for whatever reason my server couldn’t handle Zend. The readme file that accompanies Zend should have mentioned that you should use the Encoder Compatibility Test Script to determine what version you should use.

After opening up a support ticket, with their brilliant support team, we managed to get Ioncube installed on my server. It took about 6 hours to sort that out. Special thanks to Oleg Ignatiuk for the personal assistance over MSN. Cheers

As for the application itself….
The really useful features are the clean SEO urls that have replaced forumdisplay.php?=3353 with /forum-name/name-of-thread.html and also the feature that turns copy and pasted urls into title urls. Take a look here to see what i mean. First of all you’ll notice that the URL is cleaned up and secondly you should notice the link to the Family Guy torrent…it’s the page title with the combined. VBSEO wraps copy and pasted urls like this automatically.
It also adds an archiver to the bottom of each page and a previous and next link below each thread. The code is compressed and cleaned up a bit too.

But the thing is that a lot of these features are available for free from VBulletin.org. VB.org hosts a nice little mod for rewriting urls and also has the previous and next thread mod available for free.

I suppose it’s early days and i haven’t had too much time to play and to see the results of vbseo. In a month I’ll take a look at my forums stats and compare them to this months. Hopefully that will indicated if the money we passed over was well spent.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thank you for visiting! Cormac