Forum SEO: vBulletin/vbSEO vs IPB with SEO URL’S
February 8, 2010 | In: News and Information
Brandon Sheley posted this on Twitter.
I’m 95% certain I can get a vb+vbseo board to out rank an IPB forum with the same content & links.
I was going to write an article about this very topic. I had gathered the data and taken screenshots to do this and until Brandon posted on Twitter I didn’t have the urge. I have converted 3 of my communities to IPB from vBulletin. The sites all had vbSEO installed. I gathered the data from Computer Help Forums from the last week I had vBulletin with vbSEO installed and then each week after the conversion to IPB. What I did was look at stats for each week after after I converted. Initially pageviews dropped, but, site visits and visitors stayed constant. Then about 2 weeks in I noticed an increase in pageviews, visits and visitors. I also noticed that the search engines seemed to visit more often.
First a little information about the before and after. I had vBuletin installed with vbSEO. I used the vbSEO replacement feature which adds the first x words from each post to the header. I used the custom meta tags for each page and keyword thread titles.
When I converted to IPB I set up htaccess friendly url’s. I redirected the old vbSEO url’s to the default vBulletin url’s. Then used the tools IPB gives you to redirect the old url’s to the new IPB search engine friendly url’s. I have done nothing extra to the stock install of IPB to make it more SE friendly. The site doesn’t even have meta tags. I don’t know if adding them would help, but, it sure hasn’t hurt as the stats below will tell you.
Take a look at the last week I had vBulletin installed with vbSEO.
Now look at the stats from the site 2 weeks after converting to IPB.
IPB one week stats
As you can see since the switch from vBulletin with vbSEO to IPB with no extra SEO being done the site gets more traffic, more visitors and more pageviews.
Now lets look at the SE activity on the site. One would expect this to increase anyway since the search engines had to re-index all the content. That is why I went a little farther ahead with this data. I wanted to let things calm down and in order to do that I waited until a month passed.
Search engine activity from the last week vBulletin and vbSEO were installed.
Now lets look at the first week a month after the install of IPB.
As you can see the search engines seem to like the site. They visit with more frequency.
Clearly a stock install of IPB with no special SEO done to it will not hurt your site in the search engines. In fact in my case the results with a stock IPB install performed better than the install of vBulletin with vbSEO.
So getting back to Brandon’s tweet. I would bet that anything that he can do with vbSEO wouldn’t matter at all. An equal IPB forum with same content would perform as well or better. That’s my opinion anyway.
btw Bob, looking forward to an update on this post...
20 Responses to Forum SEO: vBulletin/vbSEO vs IPB with SEO URL’S
Brandon Sheley
February 8th, 2010 at 4:05 pm
I would like to see some stats a little further down the line, I have a feeling the reason why your views have gone up might be because you’re getting the whole site re-indexed.
I see 689 URL’s from your vbulletin install still.
I would like to see your results after 2 months, congrats on the traffic but I think it may be more search engine bots, than anything.
I could be wrong, but you must look at it from that view as well.
Thanks for the mention in the post
AWS
February 8th, 2010 at 4:14 pm
All those links are redirected to the new url’s. I will revisit this in another month or so. I should probably remove the redirects now. All the content is re-indexed and those links redirect to correct URL’s now. As you can see there are only 650 links left so Google is slow purging them.
I’ll update this in the future.
Dan Cryer
February 8th, 2010 at 5:31 pm
Great post! This is a big step towards demonstrating that IP.Board is great for SEO, right out of the box.
For what it’s worth, the spike in traffic shown in analytics can’t be due to increased spider activity, as bot traffic is not counted. Though of course doubling up on indexed URLs temporarily isn’t going to hurt either.
Please follow this up, I’m very intrigued to see what your ongoing performance is like.
AWS
February 9th, 2010 at 12:34 am
Thanks Dan. I will be post an update to this.
cheat-master30
February 26th, 2010 at 7:16 pm
Interesting experiment, and I guess I’m glad to see people who switch to Invision aren’t screwed over SEO wise. But wouldn’t it also be interesting to test these things as well:
1. Whether the vB SEO or Invision default setup is better for a brand new site which hasn’t been indexed already by Google?
2. And to compare the vBulletin default setup to the Invision default setup SEO results wise?
AWS
February 26th, 2010 at 10:07 pm
I have no reason to do anything like that although I will be starting 2 new sites. One with IPB and one with vbulletin so I might track and compare stats on the 2.
The only reason I did this was to see if there would be a drop in traffic because of the switch. On the contrary the site visits and pageviews increased and continue to increase.
I’ll be updating this with more stats in a couple more weeks. What I am seeing now is telling me that vbseo might actually have been hurting the site.
Anthony
March 8th, 2010 at 6:42 pm
Have you considered that it may be due to annual traffic cycles ?
Paul
March 9th, 2010 at 12:24 pm
Why did the bounce rate go up significantly after switching to IPB? I notice in both graphics that this is the case.
AWS
March 9th, 2010 at 9:50 pm
I don’t really know. I can’t explain why it went up that high. I do know that it had steadily been increasing. I attributed that to the fact I was getting traffic to search terms totally unrelated to the content of the site and people would leave right away. The bounce rate on that site has been higher than it used to be. At one time it was below 40% with the lowest at 32%. I am getting ready to do an update with more stats that I gathered. I do believe bounce rate is down in the mid 40′s now.
Bob
March 10th, 2010 at 10:32 am
How did your users react?
AWS
March 10th, 2010 at 5:14 pm
They didn’t. It was business as usual for them. Of course we changed all our help files that were vbulletin specific to reflect the changes in IPB. Other than that I truly don’t think many noticed or if they did it didn’t matter to them.
Brian Cummiskey
March 14th, 2010 at 6:19 pm
This posting is getting pumped all over the net. Congrats
Thought I would chime in with my $.02
I’m curious as to why you didn’t post any graphs that specifically show search engine referrals.
Total traffic is nice, but it really has nothing to do with SEO as it doesn’t split out when its a bookmark, type in, or search etc. I fluctuate +/-10% visits week to week normally, so a 10% split in these stats means next to nothing IMO.
Would like to see a dual timeline report of before and after date ranges that focus on search engine referrals.
Something like this:
http://i40.tinypic.com/20j6cjn.jpg
AWS
March 14th, 2010 at 8:33 pm
I have an update ready to post to this. Just have to put it on paper. It actually shows more than this does that using any sort of seo hacks is not worth it. I will be sure to include the se stats this time.
Hal9000
March 26th, 2010 at 3:01 pm
Would be able to upload the new stats to see the new stats ?
AWS
March 26th, 2010 at 4:37 pm
As I said above I will be doing that.
z3r0
April 15th, 2010 at 4:29 pm
Hello,
Will we see these new stats?
404
June 27th, 2010 at 7:41 am
any updates to this? Been wanting to switch from phpbb+phpbbseo to ipb.
I was a die hard vb fan since the 2.x days. I decided to use phpbb3 last year for a small project site. Since then, the site has blown up and I’m looking to make a transition to better software.
Raman
July 26th, 2010 at 12:27 pm
Any updates to this?
Adam
August 26th, 2010 at 2:34 am
Hi , while im agreeable of brandon and also believe i could get a vb forum with vbseo installed to out rank any ipb install im intrigued and would like to do a similar project , would you mind sharing the .htaccess you used to convert the VBseo url’s to the vb standard and then to re-write it to IPB ?
Also any updates on your stats would be nice to look at
Shishir
September 2nd, 2010 at 4:01 am
IPB 3.x does not have any option for tags, this could hamper your traffic.