Added vBSEO to another site.

Code Monkey · 01-11-2007, 10:42 PM

Added vBSEO to another one of my sites. This ones is almost three years old but kind of dead. It's really tied to a certain game that is on the decline. If it ever was on the incline that is. Anyway, I thought it would be a good experiment to see how it fixes the SERPS.

Doing a site:joystickrequired.com returns the following.

Results 1 - 10 of about 4,580 from Joystick Required - Gaming News and Discussions

I just pruned a ton of old accounts so here are the sorry stats.

674 members
1480 threads
11,767 posts

So theoretically taking into acount viewpost pages, that's about 14,000 pages. There are more with other things on the site but I will keep it to this for simplicity. So that leaves us with 10,000 pages that are not cached in google.

Unfortunately, once you start clicking on the page numbers in google you get to about page 9 and then everthing is listed as suplemental results. Which sucks in case you were wondering. Then you can keep on clicking and get to about page 24 or so and you get that dreaded message no webmaster wants to see.

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 240 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

Oh do I dread seeing that. It means we suck in the eyes of google. This is mostly caused by all the pages, in the archive I was told was cool, being duplicates. Then there are all the member pages that look the same. Remember, every page has the same META tags for description and keywords. Plus they all have the same page title.

So now we will see over time what vBSEO will do for this decrepid old site. Can it clean up it's serps like the ones for this site? Time will tell. Stay tuned.

Code Monkey · 01-18-2007, 08:28 AM

It's been a week so time for an update.

Doing a site:joystickrequired.com returns the following.

Results 1 - 10 of about 4,620 from joystickrequired.com.

Google 4,620 pages
MSN 838 pages
Yahoo 23,106 pages

This time I got to page 15 before I found suplemental results. So that's five new pages of good results in Googles cache. That's exciting isn't it? I set the vBSEO Sitemap Generator to also include the old style urls in the sitemap. The logic here being that google will follow those old links and update them when they get the 301 redirect. If you don't do this then they may view them as duplicate content. So remember when you add vBSEO to your site to set the sitemap to include old style urls. Eventually you can turn this off and reduce it's size. But I wouldn't do that untill after the viewable 1000 pages in Google is cleaned up.

It's an older site so it gets many more bots than this one. So far I have counted 2500 to over 5000 a day. Google had one day at almost 4000 hits. It's a shame that all this time it's been wasted cataloging duplicate content and hiding it. I have been paying for google (with my bandwidth charges) to do absolutely nothing. Many of us have.

I am glad that vBSEO is fixing it. Hopefully this will increase non bot traffic. Stay tuned.

Ohiosweetheart · 01-18-2007, 02:04 PM

interesting findings!

G_Man · 01-18-2007, 07:47 PM

I would like to track After Seppuku like that sometime. Not going to happen anytime soon though.

Keep us updated CM, as I love reading this sort of thing.

Code Monkey · 01-25-2007, 10:52 AM

Well, another week has gone by for vBSEO at Joystick Required - Gaming News and Discussions. Let's see how the tired old site is doing now.

Results 1 - 10 of about 6,550 from joystickrequired.com

Looks like a couple more thousand pages are cached now. That's fantastic isn't it? Now lets see how well we are doing with replacing the old ones with the new ones and driving back those dreaded suplemental results and duplicate content penalties.

Google 6550 pages
MSN 741 pages
Yahoo 25,139 pages

That's quite a jump in google. MSN is down but since they don't take sitemaps yet what can we do? They are useless and pretty much a scam show of presence for MS. Who needs them? Yahoo jumped in pages. It would be nice if they would move the new links to the front of the search. I am not going to click all the way back to find them.

And the real good news is that on the google search I can click to page 34 now before I hit suplimenatal results. That's a winner there with 20 extra pages of quality links. The dreaded duplicate content message doesn't show up till page 47 now so that shows the 20 new pages are having an effect. Google is all that really matters anyway so these results are encouraging to say the least.

watersweb · 01-25-2007, 10:34 PM

Awesome! I am planning to install vbseo this on my support forum: Just haven't had a chance yet. I've got it tentatively scheduled for February. LOL

Please keep us updated, I'm very interested in seeing how this progresses.

Thank you!

Code Monkey · 01-25-2007, 11:00 PM

It seems to have sliped back to page 33 for suplimental tonight. I'm sure that's because I pruneds about 300 posts and several forums a couple days ago. They must have removed those from some of the lower pages. It will be interesting to see how it looks in another week. I may actually start caring about that site again.

Code Monkey · 03-27-2007, 09:32 PM

Well, I forgot about this for awhile. And when I peek back in I find that vBSEO has cleaned up this tired old site. As far as SERPS go anyway. Check it out.

Google 9740 pages
Now That's a big increase!!!

MSN 541 pages
MSN sucks! They don't accept sitemaps and they rarely come arround. They are irrelevent.

Yahoo 17813 pages

I presume the drop in yahoo pages is because they are getting rid of a lot of the duplicate old style urls. They are kind of odd. They always have more pages than actually exist listed. It's confusing to say the least.

But who cares, Google is all that's relevent since 90% of all backlinks come from them.

I can now get to page 95 before seeing any subplimental results. Too me that is a success story. It means Google likes the new links and the Search Engine Optimization work done at this site and is now rewarding it with an increase in the caching of pages as well as the quality of the pages listed. Exciting to say the least. In a few months, vBSEO was able to fix the ills of this tired old vBulletin forum.

I found a new search for Google while doing this. Well, I didn't find it I learned about it. It shows you all the suplimental links of a site. This can help you figure out what needs to be done.

Instead of searching for site:joystickrequired.com I use site:joystickrequired.com *** -view

Shoes me that less than a third of the total links for this site are supplimental. When I first learned of this command it was over two thirds. So it's definately cleaning things up.

Code Monkey · 03-28-2007, 10:11 PM

Since I posted this yesterday my google cached pages droped to 8990. At first that worried me then I did the *** -view check and I saw that the drop was all supplemental pages. So in one day they droped about 700 suplemental old style url pages. Cool indeed.

Loco · 04-05-2007, 07:26 AM

looking good CM

smacklan · 04-10-2007, 03:54 PM

nice skin

Code Monkey · 04-10-2007, 08:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by smacklan

nice skin

Still unfinished though.

amenadiel · 12-26-2007, 05:22 AM

It now says there are less than 4K pages indexed:

site:joystickrequired.com - Google Search

what happened!

Code Monkey · 12-26-2007, 10:02 PM

Let's see, old thread.

Since then I dropped tag usage because it all ended up in supplemental. This was observed before Google stopped our ability to see what is taged as supplemental.

I also stopped adding individual posts to my sitemap. I Added no follow to post links. Also, I added showpost.php to robots.txt I believe. And to top it off I added the no cache meta to show post pages.

Less cached pages but more relevent and more referrals. I also went to page one for many desired keywords and phrases. Threads are all that matter. I left member pages viewable because it's a gaming site and I had planned to add more of a social feature to them. Now vBulletin itself will have that feature.

amenadiel · 12-27-2007, 05:05 AM

Interesting, I'm not including posts in the sitemap. ?What about zoint tags pages? Should those be included?

Code Monkey · 12-27-2007, 05:05 PM

Up to you. Big sites report good results but I think the noise it adds to the SE pages for small sites just outnumbers the quality results by a large margin and is not a good idea.

LBC · 01-03-2008, 09:41 AM

Great thread.

It sounds like this would be a worthy addition to almost any forum.

Off to do more research. Thanks for the updated results.

vAsia · 01-18-2008, 08:11 PM

Is vBseo worth the money?

Code Monkey · 01-19-2008, 09:25 AM

If you want to have your sites pages organized for search engines and help get them all in the SERPS without penalties then yes it's worth it. If you just have a site for you and your friends and don't really care about search engine traffic then no.