Time to dump vbseo? I've dumped it a year ago and benn happy.
vBSEO is dying. They have not been actively developing their product for a long time now.
It's a bit of a pain in the arse to dump vBSEO though, since we'll need to ensure 301 redirects are in place as well as ensuring that we still retain automatic sitemap submission.
Any statistics showing no loss in visitors from search engines, or search engine ranking, that you can provide would help me convince management, though ;P
Personally I would be quite happy to dump vBSEO and re-gain the performance of the forum, instead of having to keep throwing new server software tricks at it, but considering it affects the site directly it's not entirely up to me whether we should use it
Automatic sitemap submission is a separate product that does not require vBSEO. I still use the vBSEO Sitemap plugin from vb.org
vBSEO gave me the right redirects settings so the old URL's would point to the right links, I've done some extended testing and all links appear to work 100%.
Most of my traffic is from my game servers (direct traffic), so I am not sure how accurate things will be. I could always provide my google analytics screenshot from when I removed vBSEO. ( Removed it circa August 20th) Traffic dropped in the middle a bit, but that was mainly due to moving from multiple web hosts and lots of downtime. Things have been steady the last 3-4 months.