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.
Hi. Can you please share with us the method with the htaccess tricks to convert vbseo url to default vb url and then uses the converter script to point to new ipb url? Thanks
I posted in this same topic a few months ago before i switched to phpbb. I am back to give everyone my horror story with Invision in hopes that it gives people a better sense of what to choose.
I’ve recently purchased IPB and converted over from phpbb. If i told everyone that i have been having problems, it would be an under-statement.
First, only after a few months went by, i noticed some very old posts would show up blank. After trying to reset the boards cache etc, i figured out that the only way to fix this was to edit the posts by hand. The converter also improperly converts spanish and latin characters.
Their SEO portion of IPB is also a complete sham. I had the majority of my forum sections closed to guests in phpbb and had a page rank of 4 and a higher SERP. 4 months into IPB, i have the same permissions setup, practically zero SERP and a page rank of 3.
After some long, arduous work on the site. I let my feelings known in their customer feedback forum. Immediately my thread was deleted without any warning. I proceeded to repost the thread and was immediately belittled by the staff because i posted my issues out in the open and didn’t use their support ticket system first. I described to them that I didn’t issue a support request because short of closing the forums for hours even possibly days, the only possible solution they could have was editing each thread with issues one by one. They claimed that wasn’t true. whatever.
Zoom over today. Increasingly frustrated with my search engine ranking, i found one of many forum posts by other customers that are frustrated with their search ranks despite their support’s insistence that they have the best SEO. After a lenghy discussion about their features,the staff there set all of my posts into moderation and i received this message via private message
hxxp://i.imgur.com/d90Mj.png
So now, i have IPB support threatening me with libel. A few hours later, i see the same moronic support guy ranting about me and my forum on twitter!
hxxp://twitter.com/charleswarner
Guy has 9 forums: 2 public and 7 hidden. Spiders get 2 for content and 7 of 403 forbidden errors. Gee I wonder what’s wrong?
If you disable guest access to all of your forums please don’t complain about our SEO support.
While he never mentions my name, i know he was talking about me and my forum. We can agree to disagree on any number of topics concerning this post. However, there’s no reason for any customer support rep to threaten a customer and to air dirty laundry out on twitter.
I’ve used tons of different forums and scripts in my time. Never seen anything like this in my life. I hope it serves as a reminder next time you decide which forum software to choose.
Maybe you should read what they are saying instead of blowing it off and look up the definition of libel.
Libel – anything that is defamatory or that maliciously or damagingly misrepresents.
What you are posting is as such, as even stated in the PM that you decided to link for everyone to see.
What you are writing IS libel! What you are showing IS libel! What you are trying to do is make IPS look bad because you’re disgruntled but what you don’t understand is you have no grounds to be disgruntled because IPS HAS tried to help you in what you wanted but you didn’t want to listen to what they had to say. Instead you took the low road and attacked them viciously to make them out to be the bad guy, as you are even doing now.
Maybe, instead of blaming the solution you should put on your big boy underwear, and actually listen instead of being an aggressive douchebag. Maybe you will get better results from people if you were nicer too. I know I ignore helping assholes, I expect that most people hate dealing with them too.
You’re post is hilariously hypocritical.
I’m not going to sit here and bother volleying insults to you. I’m better than that. I’m going to show you that, while you stuck your nose in something that you really have nothing to do with, you are quite wrong and have actually let your fan mentality blind you to this. I’m quite aware of your posts over at the ipbforums, your contributions etc. If you are a fan of the product, that’s fine. I have no problem with that. That doesn’t mean that others do not have major issues with IPB as much as you and the other staffers there try to suppress that notion. Clearly, you have an issue with anyone that has a negative view of IPB and you show that in your post.
You actually really give no reason to state where i have misrepresented anything. As a matter of fact, all you ever did in this post is put up some cheap shots simply based on your own fanboy opinion. On the other hand, IPB has made numerous false claims on the SEO front. Most importantly, I can PROVE that me and quite a few others have been having SEO issues.
Alright, so you don’t like the “Libel” speak. I can still prove beyond that more than enough users converting from other forum software are being hit hard on the SEO front even if they have properly redirecting urls. I will be more than happy to post up conversations i have had with others on the issue.
I still have a valid ipb license and can link you to numerous posts where they claim they have the best SEO. Not to mention that just weeks after i posted this, they began working on an “unsupported” SEO addon called IP.SEO. If their SEO is that good and is an industry best, why would they need to create an addon? Not to mention people have been having problems with their addon as well. Let’s not even get started on their recent spam control debacle.
You seem to be a grown woman with a mind of her own. Instead of wasting your time posting insults that clearly aren’t worth my time. Do us all a favor, debate the issues with a little more common sense instead of the typical internet “WuT an Azzholezz!!1″ immaturity.
I have created a small blog showing some of my growing problems with IPB. Thanks to your post, You have given me new reason to continue updating it. I will have a number of former and current IPB customers that will be putting up their displeasure of the product. One of the customers is a vbulletin convert who will describe how IPB and their staffers literally ruined a popular, profitable website by how they (so poorly) handled a VB+VBSEO customer.
http://ipbsucks.wordpress.com/
Can you please share with us the method pls pls ???