Question Best set up practice or tutorial for DBSEO

Status
Not open for further replies.
Hello! I recently installed this (around the middle of September) on a few of my forums, and it works GREAT!

I just have a couple of questions. I did not do much in admincp as far as making too many changes to what was already set up.

My question is, what should I do next?

Do you have any type of tutorial for setting it up or for best SEO performance? A "make sure you do this this and this" type of information?

The sites I have installed it in have dropped in guest visitors so I know it is because we have lost some rankings due to the rewrites, which I expected, how long does it usually take to see results? For example, "French Bulldog Allergies" used to be at the top of google to this article: French Bulldog News Forums - French Bulldog Allergy Treatments and Prevention

Now I don't even see it on the first 5 pages.....

I see a section in admincp for defining keywords, what do these do exactly?

Thanks for your help from a SEO newbie....
 
My question is, what should I do next?
The only thing I can think of that isn't enabled by default is the automatic sitemap generation. By default, in vB4, your forum comes with a store_sitemap folder which you can CHMOD to 0777 to enable your web server to write to it. You would then go to the DBSEO CP -> Sitemap Settings -> General Settings, and turn the sitemap generation on. If you want, you can also set the sitemap generation frequency to 1 (which means daily).

If you had vB4's friendly URLs turned on before, make sure you've turned off vB4's sitemap via the "XML Sitemap" vBulletin Options - leaving both running will confuse search engines.

I see a section in admincp for defining keywords, what do these do exactly?
They affect how a few DBSEO features add keywords to your content.

For the article in question, let's say you wanted to target "dermatitis" very strongly, "antihistamine" and "allergy". You could set "dermatitis" as high priority, "antihistamine" as medium and "allergy" as low.

That means every time a thread was posted with "antihistamine" in the title or the body, it would be added to that page's meta keywords. Medium and Low priority keywords would be added if there were not enough high priority keywords.

If you define a wide range of keywords, it ensures that your content is tagged with the keywords you want to target for search engine results.
 
Thank you Fillip H.

Yes I did do the sitemap already, and I did have the XML sitemap on but never has been generated, before I was using the VBSEO sitemap generator. I have disabled it but not yet uninstalled. It took a few days to index the new sitemap but it has most of our pages indexed, which is good, probably about 90% of them. I suppose it will take some time and more hits to continue to grow in rankings. Actually looking at analytics even though the past couple of weeks have been slower, we have gone up in visitor views by 2%, so I guess I just need to be patient.

Thank you for the information on those keywords- I will surely get started on those right away.
 
I think I found a bug-- you may want to add to the filtered title words list. If your thread ends in the word "print" it will show the printable version of the thread when clicked. I had a thread called "It's Great to be a dog mom canvas print". Once I added print to the filtered keyword list it is okay. But other threads with the word print in the title did not do this, but they were not the last word in the title. Example, "Print of Colorful Bulldog Dog Painting by Alicia VanNoy Call" was okay.

Now, I've been working hard at setting this up, and I have a couple more questions.

First, what is the relevancy of tags in the sitemap. I saw in google analytics a lot of hits for an unusual term in my normal list, "sugar plum bulldogs". So I searched and it came up as:

Tags In Thread: Have any one heard of sugar plum bulldogs in ...
- English Bulldog News Forum...
English Bulldog News- For Information, Advice, Friendships and Fun. Our forums and message boards are dedicated to English Bulldog lovers and owners.

When I click on it, I get an empty page (and I am logged in) with nothing relevant to click, not even a tag cloud?

So this got me curious if I should even be including tags in my sitemap, I don't want users to end up on my site empty handed, and would rather they land on showthread.php for that term instead of a tag.

So this got me looking into the sitemap set up, I am looking at relevance in the sitemap, from 0.0-1.0

What is considered higher? Closer to 1.0 or closer to 0.0?

Is thread tags important to have in sitemap? And what is the difference between having showpost.php in sitemap vs. showthread.php?

Currently I am not adding showpost.php in my sitemap, (should I be?) and the default setting is 0.2-0.4.

Thanks for all of your help, I plan on going Pro with this as soon as I can!! :)
 
I think I found a bug-- you may want to add to the filtered title words list. If your thread ends in the word "print" it will show the printable version of the thread when clicked. I had a thread called "It's Great to be a dog mom canvas print". Once I added print to the filtered keyword list it is okay. But other threads with the word print in the title did not do this, but they were not the last word in the title. Example, "Print of Colorful Bulldog Dog Painting by Alicia VanNoy Call" was okay.
It would only happen if your Printable Thread format was set up in such a way that the formats clash when the title ends in "print". You can change the Printable Thread format to avoid this.

When I click on it, I get an empty page (and I am logged in) with nothing relevant to click, not even a tag cloud?
That's the Advanced User Tagging mod, so it's no wonder why you wouldn't get any content there :)

So this got me curious if I should even be including tags in my sitemap, I don't want users to end up on my site empty handed, and would rather they land on showthread.php for that term instead of a tag.
I don't think it hurts :)

So this got me looking into the sitemap set up, I am looking at relevance in the sitemap, from 0.0-1.0

What is considered higher? Closer to 1.0 or closer to 0.0?
1.0 is higher.

Is thread tags important to have in sitemap? And what is the difference between having showpost.php in sitemap vs. showthread.php?
I'd probably recommend disabling showpost and favouring showthread, as each individual post should be indexed regardless.
 
It would only happen if your Printable Thread format was set up in such a way that the formats clash when the title ends in "print". You can change the Printable Thread format to avoid this.

That's the Advanced User Tagging mod, so it's no wonder why you wouldn't get any content there :)

I don't think it hurts :)

1.0 is higher.

I'd probably recommend disabling showpost and favouring showthread, as each individual post should be indexed regardless.

Awesome, thank you for the advice. Now it does make sense about coming to the site with nothing.

So when I enable "Tags" in the sitemap, am I enabling @ user tagging or thread tags?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Legacy DragonByte SEO

vBulletin 3.8.x vBulletin 4.x.x
Seller
DragonByte Technologies
Release date
Last update
Total downloads
7,169
Customer rating
5.00 star(s) 1 ratings
Back
Top