I use vBSEO.

vBSEO is indeed the tool of choice - it has a host of big and small SEO features, and offers the persnickety SEO person plenty of options.

I am considering the purchase of vBseo for a new forum.
Can someone provide me with a SPECIFIC analysis of this product as far as features, benefits, personal experience, realised benefits in traffic & revenue [before & after install comparison], etc.

I keep seeing comments either "it sucks" or "its the best thing since al gore invented the internet" with no explanation why this opinion was arrived at. These arent any use to anyone and I half think they are suspect.

Thanks

The problem with case studies is that the installation of software is rarely the only variable. On one large forum, I did see traffic climb steadily in the months following installation. But, you might well ask what else changed. More links? Sure. More user-created content? Sure. I do feel that vBSEO has boosted search traffic, but how much is impossible to say.

Having said that, I've been doing SEO for 10 years and I found that vBSEO did just about all of the things to a vBulletin forum that I thought about doing myself, and quite a few beyond that. If I was going to bring a new vBulletin forum online today and if search traffic was important, I'd install vBSEO right out of the gate.

vBSEO is the best second choice way to go but I don't feel that it is as good as taking the time to go over the entire code yourself, section by section by 100 more sections.

There is a group of vBSEO-like choices that each do some things better but do other things worse.

The major hurdle - creating a generic application capable of working on everyones forum inherently means that someone willing to completely customize their own application can likely do better.

I found there was no "instant hit" after installing it, but still am glad that I did.

The one thing it does very well is remove any chance of duplicate content being indexed, and if used with relevant replacements can always ensure each thread has a good chance of ranking well. Since installing it I am ranking far better for a few off topic threads that I would have never would have thought would get any traffic in, but going by the stats from Google Analytics's people are finding these threads, then joining my forums.

Negatives, it does add a slight increase in load to the server, cant think of any other significant ones.

Vbseo is the best tool available for vbulletin seo but the default settings are not the best.

* If you install their sitemap tool make sure you disable the "add show post pages & tags" otherwise your server load will increase immensely.

* like jon said there is a way to remove the show post pages with relative urls.

* I use memcached to cache the urls.

Thanks for you opinions. Loading one project now, and this vbseo tool will be usefull.

vBseo was installed and works wonderfully...nearly instant ranking for highly competitive keywords. Highly recommended.

<--- agrees. vbSEO FTW. ;)

As with any generic software you can go through it section by section and make improvements (SEO, anti-spam, functionality etc)to almost all of them. Making it look less like everyone elses forum to crawlers has definite advantages.