Mod Rewrite and vBSEO with vBulletin

[Greg]

Many debates for and against using mod rewrite have been mounted. Most, if not all, of these debates ended in an even score.

Some of the most important facts we can use for making the decision to mod rewrite are contained in the words of Matt Cutts from google on mod rewrite (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6860320126300142609).


...You can use too many dynamic parameters.
...
It's probably better to use mod rewrite...


The quotes above by Matt Cutts mean two things to us that use vBulletin Forum Software for our websites.

First, since vBulletin has many URLs which contain more then three or even five dynamic parameters, mod rewrite should seriously be considered to increase your changes of being indexed in the SERPs.

Second, whether the SEs will continue on past the page being crawled allowing it and other pages linked in it to be indexed in the SERPs from your website.

What can you do? You can consider using a commercial product such as vBSEO (http://www.vbseo.com/374/) by Crawlability, Incorporated.

vBSEO technology integrates seemlessly with your vBulletin forum to convert your stock vBulletin URLs from dynamic to static format. Here is an example from our Motorcycle Forum (http://www.riderinfo.com/) of the difference between a thread URL in dynamic vBulletin format and static format rewritten by vBSEO...


http://www.riderinfo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4795

http://www.riderinfo.com/forums/f58/rider-info-motorcycle-forum-information-flyer-4795/


The first line of the code above shows a stock vBulletin URL. The second line shows an URL rewritten by vBSEO.

Notice that the second URL appears to be a static web page and that the keywords from the title of the thread are in the URL now. The benefits described above by Matt Cutts are obvious, plus the benefit of keywords in the URL is realized.

Installation of vBSEO requires that your server have either Zend Optimizer (http://www.zend.com/products/zend_optimizer) or IonCube Decoder (http://www.ioncube.com/sa_encoder.php). Both of these products have the necessary software for you to run vBSEO with your vBulletin forum available for free download.

If you are on shared hosting, your host will have to install one or the other for you. In most cases you will find that either Zend or IonCube decoder software is already installed. If it is not, the IonCube version of vBSEO comes with runtime versions of the necessary IonCube decoders enabling you to run vBSEO with no special help from your host necessary.

If you own your own server, you can decide which version of the necessary decoders you want to run and setup your server accordingly.

It would also be beneficial to run a PHP caching module as well to improve the performance of your server. Again, shared hosts may already provide this. Those with dedicated servers they manage can choose one of the many available.

For our server we chose to use the IonCube version of vBSEO thus we have installed the IonCube decoders and implemented them at the server level integrated with PHP. This required the uploading of the IonCube software to our server and an edit of the php.ini file. After the edit of the php.ini file a restart of apache put the IonCube decoder in use on our server.

We also chose to use a PHP caching module on our server. We installed the APC PHP cache (http://pecl.php.net/package/APC). This required that we upload files to our server, that we compile the code, and another edit of our php.ini file. Then a restart of apache again to activate the APC cache.

Upon implementation of the APC caching module, we noticed an improvement of our page loads when visiting our web sites. Not just the motorcycle forum running vBSEO, but all of our websites. This is certainly a benefit that all webmasters can take advantage of and should.

Our server load before installing and after installing vBSEO has not changed. But as noted above, our page loads have actually improved as a result of the server preparation we did to install and use vBSEO.

That's all for now. Keep an eye on this forum for updates of our experience with vBSEO. We will be talking some more about the configuration of vBSEO (http://www.vbseo.com/374/) as we gain more knowledge of the product.

[AnthonyCea]

When did you switch to vBSEO ??

[Greg]

We installed vBSEO (http://www.vbseo.com/374/) this week on our motorcycle forum (http://www.riderinfo.com/). In this business, you have to take advantage of every edge you can get.

The server tune up and mods alone I did in preparation for vBSEO have yielded benefits. Now I will sit back and watch for changes in the SERPs and report on that as time goes on.

One thing that cannot be argued is that mod rewrite will hurt a website. vBSEO comes with a price tag, but for a professional, it seems like a worthy investment. I could not have duplicated the code in any time frame based on what I charge per hour to do the same and come out having invested less.

[Ohiosweetheart]

VERY good! I can't wait to get my copy of vbSEO!

[mikelbeck]

For our server we chose to use the IonCube version of vBSEO thus we have installed the IonCube decoders and implemented them at the server level integrated with PHP.

Why did you choose IonCube over Zend?

[Ben5150]

question what is VBSEO I never heard of it before, what does it do?

[Greg]

Why did you choose IonCube over Zend?

After a lot of reading over at the vBSEO Forum, I followed the lead of some others that run dedicated servers. Specificly the info in this thread (http://www.vbseo.com/f2/zend-vs-ioncube-7143/). Notice the developers posts from IonCube. From a technical stand point, I found the information he provided very good and legitiment.

I can't speak from experience that one or the other is a better combination however because I did not try other configurations such as zend with Eaccelerator or zend with APC. However, the vBulletin API that uses Eaccelerator calls does have bugs and that weighed into my decision to use APC instead.

I can say without a doubt, the configuration I am using is very stable and the performance of the server is very good. I can see no increase in load due to the extra overhead that one might think would come with using vBSEO (http://www.vbseo.com/374/).

question what is VBSEO I never heard of it before, what does it do?

vBSEO (http://www.vbseo.com/374/) changes your stock dynamic vBulletin URLs to static URLs, it eliminates many duplicate URLs that exist in vBulletin and gives you a better shot at getting listed in the search engines with more keywords. It provides a linkback and pingback system for vBulletin, like blogs, too. There are some other features, but I'm running out of brain power tonight.

[mikelbeck]

What type of server do you have? (CPU, memory, disk, etc)?

[Greg]

What type of server do you have? (CPU, memory, disk, etc)?

I have the essential VPS from servint listed here. http://www.servint.net/vps/

[mikelbeck]

After a lot of reading over at the vBSEO Forum, I followed the lead of some others that run dedicated servers. Specificly the info in this thread (http://www.vbseo.com/f2/zend-vs-ioncube-7143/). Notice the developers posts from IonCube. From a technical stand point, I found the information he provided very good and legitiment.

Hey, that's kind of funny... the thread they reference on the vbulletin.com site is one of mine. ;-)

It reminded me why I have to stick with Zend over IonCube, though, I've got a couple of apps running on my server that are Zend encoded.

[mikelbeck]

The server tune up and mods alone I did in preparation for vBSEO have yielded benefits. Now I will sit back and watch for changes in the SERPs and report on that as time goes on.

Are you going to track SERPs on multiple sites? For example, a site that has vBSEO against one that doesn't?

[Greg]

Hey, that's kind of funny... the thread they reference on the vbulletin.com site is one of mine. ;-)
It reminded me why I have to stick with Zend over IonCube, though, I've got a couple of apps running on my server that are Zend encoded.

That kinda makes that decision a necessity for you then. But there are many people over at vBSEO that will argue ZEND is faster.

Are you going to track SERPs on multiple sites? For example, a site that has vBSEO against one that doesn't?

If I do, it will have to be this one against the other. But the motorcycle forum has been around a long time and I have several years of stats and such to draw on for a before and after. I think that data will be worth more then a side by side comparison of two seperate websites with different topics. I don't think a side by side is a fair comparison as there are just too many seperations in the data.

[mikelbeck]

If I do, it will have to be this one against the other. But the motorcycle forum has been around a long time and I have several years of stats and such to draw on for a before and after. I think that data will be worth more then a side by side comparison of two seperate websites with different topics. I don't think a side by side is a fair comparison as there are just too many seperations in the data.

Yes, but for example if you see a huge increase in the number of pages indexed for you site, you may attribute it to vBSEO when it's really just the SE's adjusting their indexes. So if you track both this site and the other site, and both show an increase, you know what the real deal is. But if the other site shows a big increase and this one doesn't... well, you get the idea.

[Greg]

Well, in this case, I can do both. So all we can do is watch and see at this point.

However, with what I have been working with in the SERPs, I think a big change will be obvious as to what caused it. The second and more important factor will be traffic based on keywords. That is trackable and tangleble. I don't think a 3 year change in tend will be the result of an algo update in the SEs if it should occur. We're working with a long term track record here and well established linking record that was and plays out as deliberate, so change will be noticable.

[wpwood3]

Another SEO tool is vBSEO Sitemap. It is a free plugin available at vBulletin.org (http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=100435). It also uses Mod Rewrite to create sitemaps (https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html) and automatically submits the sitemaps to Google. You can manually submit them to Yahoo. Once Google & Yahoo are aware of your sitemap they will download them automatically.

We have been using eAccelerator (http://eaccelerator.net/) and before that Turck MMCache (http://sourceforge.net/projects/turck-mmcache) for PHP cache and acceleration. The speed improvement is impressive.

Another important thing to consider for improving search engine rankings is a landing page. The landing page should contain text and links that reinforce the keywords you want the search engines to find.
For example...on my website we sell Mercedes Parts so the keywords "Mercedes Parts" are important. If you do a search in Google (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Mercedes+Parts) or Yahoo (http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=Mercedes+Parts&fr=yfp-t-501&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8) for the words "Mercedes Parts" my site, MercedesShop.com, always shows up in the top 5.

[chick]

In reading posts at the SEO site I found a few complaints of garbage SEO adds to a site.... yet, I do not see SEO itself actually claiming or listing all the crap puts on your site. There is not enough detail over there to make a proper assesment of the SEO hack.

Are some type of furl communities, links, google ads, put on your site?

Are members aware something is different?

Are there xtra features members can see.

I have notice on some forums (don't know if it's seo) but in posts, there are word links with little popups through no fault of the poster, it just somehow gets linked.

What is that?

[Greg]

vBSEO (http://www.vbseo.com/374/) is transparent to your members and for the benefit of getting your website crawled by and listed in the search engines.

vBSEO does not put ads on your site, it has nothing to do with advertising. (there is a copyright added to the footer though if you install it)

However, if you advertise, a better position in the search engines due to good SEO can generate more traffic for you and then usually more revenue for you.

SEO in general is necessary and it's not "garbage" in any way shape or form. We as webmasters live by or die by SEO. It's in our best interest to take advantage of the latestet SEO techniques if we want to be continually successful.

SEO comes in many forms. vBSEO (http://www.vbseo.com/374/) is a tool for vBulletin forums that implements many of the most current SEO techniques. It presents them in a package that is easily applied and updated with changing trends so you can concentrate on building your community.

[chick]

I see. Thank you for the info. Helps me to make a decision. Is this an easy install for a novice?

[Greg]

I see. Thank you for the info. Helps me to make a decision. Is this an easy install for a novice?

That is not easy to answer. The setup can be a challenge. But, the folks at vBSEO would help you. I would suggest getting support arranged in advance rather then after the fact.

In a nutshell, the install is very easy. Some of the decisions in setup can be daunting. But once it's set, you forget it.

[Loco]

In reading posts at the SEO site I found a few complaints of garbage SEO adds to a site.... yet, I do not see SEO itself actually claiming or listing all the crap puts on your site. There is not enough detail over there to make a proper assesment of the SEO hack.

All the extras they put in the vbseo product are there to optimize your site. All can be disabled and customized how the admin wants them.

I can assure you that mod_rewrite helps by looking at my SERP's and seeing the text in the url Bolded.
:)