The main reason I’m asking about it is because of the URL rewrite features vbSEO offers, it’s exactly what I want for my new vBulletin forums I’m starting. Although $150 sounds awfully high to pay just for some SEO software, but then again Webmaster-Talk uses it.

(I looked at other options like vRewrite and Zoints SEO, but they all involve either hard coding and weren’t working right, or just caused problems for my server, panel crashes, etc.)

I’m not too concerned about the other SEO options it may offer, like “better SE rankings”, adsense optimization, or whatever. But I might as well use them to get my money’s worth.

So what do you guys think? Anyone have any personal experience with it?

In my opinion, vBSEO is good but it is NOT worth the price that they are charging.
If you can afford to spend $149, then go for it.

You're using wordpress to do the same thing; it looks like you even set your own permalink structure. It uses two lines of .htaccess, and internally redirects to a php page with a query string.

Could you borrow the same idea? I haven't looked inside the php file that does the magic, but I don't expect it's that complicated...

I wasn’t aware of that possibility, thanks. But would that rewrite apply to everything (including lesser pages like memberlists, who’s online, etc.)

Here is my current WP htaccess file, I’m not sure which parts I would put into my VB htaccess file, and which php template it would be directed to:

Options +FollowSymLinks 
RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^toptenlisted\.com 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.toptenlisted.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]
# index.php to /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.php$ /$1 [R=301,L] 
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

In my opinion, if it is worth it depends on the current size of your forum.
If it's a brand new forum with little content you might be better of waiting a little while until the thread and post content builds up. vbseo is a pretty powerful and feature rich script.

In any case, vbseo was definitely worth it for Webmaster-Talk.com

Thanks Tim

Originally Posted by TimSchroeder

In my opinion, if it is worth it depends on the current size of your forum.
If it's a brand new forum with little content you might be better of waiting a little while until the thread and post content builds up. vbseo is a pretty powerful and feature rich script.

Yeah, right now I’m just starting out, my current license really is barely a week old.


Did the URL rewrite function work well for you? As in were there conflictions with the search engines, or problems with links not recognizing the new URLs? Basically was it a smooth transition for you? (That is of course if you purchased vbSEO sometime after launching WT.)

Just wanted to make sure I had all the fundamentals down (in this case nice looking URLs, etc.) when I get ready to launch my forum.