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vBSEO stands for "vBulletin Search Engine Optimization", a powerful custom "mod" (modification) for vBulletin, one of the Internet's most popular website forums. Because of its user-friendly interface, installation and customization of vBSEO can be completed in minutes even by novice vBulletin admins. vBSEO makes vBulletin Search Engine Optimization for your forums a reality.

vBSEO is a mod for the vBulletin software. vBulletin enthusiasts often refer to such modifications as "hacks". Once installed, vBSEO ensures that all of your vBulletin forum content and threads can be included in Internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, AltaVista, AskJeeves, and hundreds of smaller search engines.

• How does vBSEO make my vBulletin forums search engine friendly?
• Why is configuring static URLs for your forum and thread pages important?
• Why should you choose vBSEO?
• Doesn't vBulletin do this already?
• Key Features of vBSEO
• vBSEO Custom Rewrite Rules - Ensuring Full Compatibility with 3rd Party vBulletin Hacks
• vBSEO Makes the vBulletin Archive into a Perfect Sitemap
• vBSEO Provides an Easy Backup, Restore, and Sharing Feature
• Additional Search Engine Optimization Features
• Are there any performance issues with vBSEO?
• What are the minimum system requirements to run vBSEO?
• What are the vBSEO license requirements (or EULA)?

vBSEO makes your vBulletin forum and thread pages look "static". Static URL means that they appear to be just like regular website pages that end in .html or .htm, etc. Search engines love static pages (as opposed to dynamic URLs like PHP scripts, etc). But this is just the beginning. One of vBSEO's most unique features is that it allows you to configure the actual format of all URLs (website addresses) for forum pages. You can choose to customize your own CRU (Content Relevant URL with relevant keywords embedded) however you choose. Even achieving a CNN.com style URL configuration is possible.

vBSEO allows you to include important keywords from your forum display, thread display, and other pages into the actual URL for the static page - The result is a CRU or Content Relevant URL. Search engines are capable of finding keywords in website URLs and comparing them against the webpage textual content to determine where the page should be displayed in the search engine results pages (SERPs). If you are not listed highly in the search engine results, you will not have very many Web visitors to your forums. The growth and success of your forum depends largely on the visibility or exposure its obtains from the search engines.

Search engine ranking algorithms consider 100s of factors when determining how prominently to include your web pages in their search results (SERPs). Therefore, it is vitally important to the success of your website that you take every step possible to search engine optimize your vBulletin forums. Content Relevant URLs is the first step towards complete vBulletin Search Engine Optimization.

The process of modifying vBulletin for search engine friendliness is extremely complex without vBSEO. Many expert web programmers have learned from experience that creating static CRUs requires (1) modifying templates, (2) modifying vBulletin source code, and (3) modifying .htaccess files. Even if you do spend the countless hours completing these tasks, a newly released version of vBulletin would require that a lot of this work be repeated. Consider the cost involved in taking that approach whether you take on the task yourself or hire a consultant to do it for you.Can you say "headache"? There is simply no better solution that to spend the 5 minutes it requires to fully install and activate vBSEO.

vBSEO takes a non-intrusive approach. We have spent countless months perfecting vBSEO. We have had a team of live forum admins, some of whom are experts in Search Engine Optimization, test the software through 7 release candidates. vBSEO 2.0 is now bulletproof and requires the addition of only 3 external files along with one (1) line of code that must be added to the vBulletin functions.php file.* You can install vBSEO in under 5 minutes or less.

* vBulletin code modification not required for vBulletin versions 3.5.x or newer. The installation is handled via the Plugin Manager in the vBulletin Admin CP.

Certainly vBSEO is not the holy grail of Search Engine Optimization for vBulletin. After all, SEO these days is almost rocket science. However, if you want a proven method of making your vBulletin forum more search engine friendly, optimized for better rankings, and able to draw more search engine traffic, then you should definitely install vBSEO for your vBulletin forums.

vBulletin includes an archive feature in versions 3.0.x, 3.5.x and 3.5.x. This feature does an excellent job of helping search engines to locate a copy of the postings, threads and other content created by your forum members. Getting included (or indexed) in the search engines is Step 1. Step 2 is getting listed prominently for the important keywords that are included in your content. vBSEO picks up where vBulletin's archive feature leaves off and corrects a many areas that lead to non-optimized search engine pages:

• Duplicate content: If the search engines review both your archive and regular forum pages they can determine that the content is duplicated which often results in large quantities of pages that are flagged as duplicate content being left out of the search engines.
• Google Page Rank: The world's leading search engine is Google. It evaluates web sites based on a page-ranking algorithm (i.e. Google Page Rank). The Page Rank algorithm relies heavily on the number of other web pages that link to your website (called backlinks). If other web sites begin linking to your vBulletin archive content instead of your main forum pages, some of your Google Page Rank value can be lost. Search Engine Marketing experts refer to this as "Page Rank Leak".

vBSEO helps eliminate issues with vBulletin duplicate content and leaking of Google Page Rank.

• Installation requires copying of only (3) external files, and adding (1) line of code to your vBulletin functions.php file. (note: here is no alteration of functions.php needed in vBulletin versions 3.5x and above.)
• 100% compatible with all vBulletin 3.0.x, vBulletin 3.5.x and vBulletin 3.6x versions.
• 100% compatible with vBulletin hacks such as vBadvanced and vBindex.
• vBSEO Settings Backup, Restore, and Sharing
• vBulletin Archive Sitemap
• vBSEO Custom Rewrite Rules
• Redirects of vBulletin archive threads to your optimized static pages use "301 Permanent Redirects". This is the Google-Safe way of redirecting content. Alternatively, you can have the archive threads link to the actual "static" looking content, thus converting the archive into the perfect "Sitemap" for vBulletin.
• 301 Redirect old (showthread.php) generated pages to the new, static content. Specially useful if you operated your dynamic vBulletin for a long period.
• All queries and RegEx (regular expressions) are optimized to ensure minimal overhead or load is placed on your web server.
• Session ID's are removed for known and unknown visitors. Even on the first visit!
• Search engines and users are prevented from finding duplicate content by ensuring that links to the various vBulletin areas point to the same static pages wherever they occur, including:
  • Forumjump landing pages
  • Landing pages (and post anchors) after posting new threads or posts
  • Landing pages (and post anchors) for 'Last Post by', 'Latest Post' and 'Newest Post' in threads
  • Landing pages for 'previous' & 'next' threads
  • Landing pages for 'Go To Page' forms (vBulletin 3.5.x or greater)
  • Search Results
• Configure all aspects of the static URL format used for:
• • Forums
  • Threads
  • Member Profiles
  • Pagination Links (Forums, Threads, Member List)
  • Polls
  • Individual Announcement Pages
  • Multiple Announcements Pages
• Define your directory structure:
  • Virtual Structure (Example: forum/subforum-name/thread-title.html)
• • Root Structure (Example: forum/thread-title.html)
• Make your URLs relative or absolute:
  • Relative (Example: /forum/thread-title.html)
  • Absolute (Example: www.yourdomain.com/forum/thread-title.html)
• Extra Search Engine Optimization Features

vBSEO has a built in Custom Rewrite Engine that allows every vBSEO user to create their own custom static URL rewriting. No other static URL hack in existence today comes equipped with such an advanced feature. This ensures that vBulletin forum admins who have any other 3rd party hack installed will be able to remain fully compatible and can avoid duplicate content issues and further improve their vBulletin Search Engine Optimization.

vBSEO allows you to change the format of vBulletin Archive URLs to something such as http://yoursite.com/archive/ or http://yoursite.com/sitemap/. This simplifies the URL format and allows the vBulletin archive to function even when running PHP as CGI.

vBSEO provides the ability to backup, restore, and share your vBSEO (a) configuration settings and (b) custom rewrite rules to XML files. Users can easily copy the settings of another vBSEO enabled forum if they are provided with the XML backup file. Users are encourage to discuss and share their Search Engine Optimization strategies and vBSEO configurations at our vBulletin modification forums.

• Force Forum Root as Homepage & Homepage Aliases features ensure that your Google Page Rank for your forum homepage is consolidated and maximized.
• Cleanup HTML code by removing unnecessary white space and comment tags from the output. This boosts your C2C ratio (Content to Code) and reduces the size of all vBulletin forum and thread pages resulting in lower bandwidth requirements, faster downloads, and fast page display for your forum members and visitors.
• Customize vBulletin's response to error handling by (a) redirecting to your homepage, (b) issuing a 404 HTTP error code, or (c) running your custom defined error script (my404error.php).
• Add rel=nofollow to showpost.php and printthread.php links to avoid duplicate content issues.
• Use a smart rel=nofollow that automatically decides when to add rel=nofollow to showpost.php pages to maximize your content indexing while avoiding duplicate content penalties.
• Optionally force absolute URLs in all of your forum and thread pages. Some Search Engine Optimization experts believe that search engines favor absolute URLs.
• Dynamic keyword & description meta tag replacement. Assign thread content to your meta tags. Inktomi is still known to use META tags.
• "Stop Word" filtering for URL titles. Filter out common (non-relevant) words so that other words are assigned greater relevance.
• Acronym Expansion. Automatically expand common acronyms used in postings so that the expanded terms are discovered by search engines and assigned greater relevancy. Example: Search Engine Optimization could be expanded to "Search Engine Optimization". This can occur within your static Content Relevant URL only, or within the entire page content.
• Image URL and ALT tag replacement for breadcrumb navigation folders. The small tree navigation folder URLs (and ALT tags) are rewritten to boost image relevancy for the thread topic.
• Image attachment rewriting helps improve relevancy in threads that include attachments.

All queries and RegEx (regular expressions) used for vBSEO have been optimized and will have almost no observable performance impact for small to large sized vBulletin forums. However, webmasters hosting extremely large, resource intensive forums may be concerned with the additional overhead (server load) required by vBSEO's rewriting functionality. To minimize the impact for these large forums we have created several configuration options allowing you to deactivate different components of vBSEO such as (1) image URL rewriting, (2) avatar URL rewriting, (3) member profile URL rewriting, etc.

NOTE: vBSEO includes a feature for Cleaning Up HTML code that will result in faster webpage display for all of your vBulletin forum and thread pages resulting in improved user performance.

• vBSEO works with all current vBulletin versions 3.0.x, 3.5.x, 3.6.x, and requires Apache's mod_rewrite module to be installed and activated. NOTE: Apache mod_rewrite is typically enabled by default on most web servers. If not, you can request your web hosting provider to install and enable it.
• vBSEO is encrypted in two version: (1) ionCube and (2) Zend. Your web host must be compatible with either Zend or the ionCube loader in order for you to successfully run vBSEO. NOTE: Most web hosting providers already have 1 of these two options installed, or will do so at your request.

Click here to view the vBSEO End User License Agreement.