Forum Why is Vbulletin killing our SEO? Has Your Traffic Dropped after Upgrading to VB4?

محروم.كوم · #1 02-02-2010, 10:10 PM

Am I the only forum owner that has noticed that the forum name is now excluded from thread titles? This has proven to be nearly fatal to one of my forums with around 20,000 members. Without keywords added to the posts, some threads make absolutely no sense or will never be found. Even threads you may think are titled half deceit like: "When to change synthetic oil" brings no traffic if it isn't coupled with a keyword associated with the forum like "Honda Accord Forum", "Golf MKV Forum", "Subaru WRX Forum", etc. Google puts some of its strongest weight on titles. This goes for adsense too. So get ready to lose 90% of your adsense income.

So someone searching for "Honda Accord When to change synthetic oil" will probably never find your thread now titled "When to change synthetic oil" in google. Actually that search will return thousands of results, the only forum results is where either the forum name shows up in the title or if the Thread creator had the forethought of including "Honda Accord" in it's thread title. This of course hardly ever happens, members don't think to add "Honda Accord" if they are on a "Honda Accord" forum. But searchers and Google can't read the poster's thoughts and needs some guidance to find the correct result.

At this time, I feel cheated and deceived by Vbulletin. I put my faith into you and I wasn't even notified that something this significant was missing in VB4 compared to VB3.8. This small fact that your tech seemed to find so insignificant, has cost me over 1500 unique visitors per day from just google. I've started putting in temporary fixes which has immediately caused my results to start to climb, but without at least the forum name in the title, I fear I'm not the only lamb being lead to slaughter

The idea fix for this would be to make thread titles amendable by forum. So a thread in a forum about a Ford Cougar wouldn't be mistaken by Google as a thread about Mountain Lions. i.e. "my cougar climbs mountains fast"

Making members change the title of their threads alienate them also. Plus who wants to look at 500 threads that has Chevrolet Avalanche as the first part of the thread. Makes for a very confusing time.
Here's how Google saw it in VB3.8
Oil Change Intervals Chevrolet Avalanche Forum

noob cool ride Chevrolet Avalanche Forum

transmission problem Chevrolet Avalanche Forum

wheel change Chevrolet Avalanche Forum

healight fix Chevrolet Avalanche Forum

interior light DIY Chevrolet Avalanche Forum

Now this is how google sees the same threads in VB4:
Oil Change Intervals

noob cool ride

transmission problem

wheel change

healight fix

interior light DIY

Get it? Each Forum needs to have variable keywords for the titles. VBULLETIN, PLEASE FIX THIS

BTW, Has anyone else upgraded to VB4.0 and seen their traffic drop off the face of the earth? __DEFINE_LIKE_SHARE__