Hey Brian, how would you like to trade a paid trip to China in exchange for the inside scoop on all your forum knowledge? I’m serious. Use my contact form if interested.

vBSEO is 100% legit. It is all white-hat. There’s 0 cloaking involved and doesn’t attempt to game anything or anyone. It simply fixes/takes over where vB left off (err, never started).

The main item is the link consensuses. 1 link for 1 resource.
with stock vB, you can get to a thread many ways.
the archive, the print version, threaded, hybdird, or regular, and then finally, for every post, showthread.php?p=123 on a post-by-post basis instead of ?t=456. vBSEO cleans up all that nonsense into ONE url, thus eliminating duplicate content, and also keeps 3rd party links all linking to a particular thread with ONE resource.

As far as being a celebrity, I’m on my way to being banned from vb altogether because their staff is useless. I may have to start working on my own solution.

Here’s my latest run-in: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=274777

or, maybe i’ll link to it like this:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1576990

or like this:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?mode=hybrid&t=274777

or…… you get the point 😀

I have had many PhpBB forums for about 8 years, and switched one of them over to VBulletin 3.7 about a month ago with blog addon.

I don’t mind sinking some money into it – but it just kills me when software gets updated and 3rd party mods aren’t integrated – so I’ve been keeping it safe so far.

Can you give any insight into SEO for 3.7 ? I haven’t gotten VBSEO – mainly just because I really try not to game the search engines any more. (I used to be very heavy into SEO and got tagged and burned by Google BIG TIME – cost a dozen people their jobs).

Re: VB Plugin system – I agree – it’s phenomenal. I’ve spent years doing direct page editing search/replace in PhpBB – and VB is so ridiculously easy add plugins.

FYI – I feel kind of honored you posted here. You’re something of a celebrity in the VBulletin and SEO world!

My whole point of the article can be summed up with “I’m not happy with vB’s progress as of late”.

I switched to vB SOLEY for vBSEO, and it’s done WONDERS for my community and my wallet. But, that was 2006. Here we are 2 years later and other technologies have certainly passed vB in the needs of what I want out of a forum software.

I probably won’t ever go to phpBB.

What i really want is:
IPB’s blog system and corporate tools (are they even done yet?)
vB’s plugin system
phpbb3’s template engine
SMF’s poll options and mobile skins
Vanilla’s footprint

I would pay GREAT money for that forum software.

Will it ever happen? probably not.

I’m hoping vB4 fills me in my template engine needs, and they have stated they are re-working to poll options as well. With that, my main gripe is going to be the resource hog of it all.