vBSEO Case Study 3-Week Update
August 22, 2007 Posted by Tyler CruzNearly a month ago I started a case study on the popular vBulletin product vBSEO by purchasing two licenses and running them on two of my sites. This was a rather expensive price to undertake partly for a new blog post series at a price of $350, but I felt the information and study would be worth it.
Read my original post on this case study if you are unfamiliar with it.
It should be noted that I started the study on July 24th, and it’s currently August 21st as I write this, so all data and changes are not from exactly a months period, but close to it at 27-days.
Anyhow, here are the stats. Some of the them may appear very obfuscated and confusing, but I suggest you take the time to really look at them because the data is VERY interesting. The data within the parenthesis is the change since the previous calculation:
Starcraft2.net
Traffic:
Jun 23 – July 23
Google Organic: 211
Yahoo Organic: 50
July 21 – August 21
Google Organic: 864 (+653)
Yahoo Organic: 186 (+136)
Indexed Pages:
Jun 23 – July 23
Google: 92
MSN: 25
Yahoo/Fast/Altavista: 94
July 21 – August 21
Google: 418 (+326)
MSN: 31 (+6)
Yahoo/Fast/Altavista: 99 (+5)
SERP Results:
– = Not in the first 200 results
G = Google
M = MSN
Y = Yahoo!
“Search Term” [July 23 Rankings] [August 21 Rankings]
“starcraft 2″ [G – M — Y 31] [G 37 M 31 Y 94]
“starcraft2″ [G — M — Y 24] [G 8 M 7 Y 8]
“starcraft forums” [G 79 M — Y 9] [G 44 M 8 Y 17]
“starcraft forum” [G — M — Y 7] [G — M 81 Y 16]
“starcraft2 forum” [G 37 M 81 Y 4] [G 32 M 1 Y 2 ]
“starcraft2 forums” [G 46 M — Y 1] [G 68 M 1 Y 4]
“starcraft 2 forums” [G 48 M — Y 4] [G 52 M 3 Y 12]
“starcraft” [G — M — Y –] [G — M 115 Y –]
MMAForums.net
Traffic:
Jun 23 – July 23
Google Organic: 2349
Yahoo Orgnaic: 33
July 21 – Aug 21
Google Organic: 2204 (-145)
Yahoo Organic: 43 (+10)
Indexed Pages:
June 23 – July 23
Google: 4,230
MSN: 94
Yahoo/Fast/Altavista: 3,094
June 23 – July 23
Google: 3,680 (-550)
MSN: 83 (-11)
Yahoo/Fast/Altavista: 4,086 (+992)
SERP Results:
– = Not in the first 200 results
G = Google
M = MSN
Y = Yahoo!
“Search Term” [July 23 Rankings] [August 21 Rankings]
“mma forums” [G 4 M — Y 57] [G 3 M — Y 7]
“mma forum” [G 32 M – Y 126] [G 7 M 93 Y 8]
“ufc forums” [G 17 M — Y –] [G 16 M — Y –]
“mma” [G 111 M — Y –] [G 128 M — Y –]
Monthly Summary
Starcraft2.net
Starcraft2.net had a great increase in natural search engine traffic at around 800 more uniques from the previous month, about 25 more per day. It had a massive increase in indexed pages as well, with an increase of about 400% from Google. If correct, this would make sense as there should be a direct correlation between indexed pages and natural search engine traffic.
Additionally, Starcraft2.net’s SERPS had a great improvent as well, with MSN seeming to absolutely love vBSEO. Google stayed roughly the same, but appeared on the board for two of the most important terms. Yahoo worsend slightly for every keyword.
Overall, it was a fantastic month for Starcraft2.net. We’ll have to see if next month we see more improvements.
MMAForums.net
Unfortuantely MMAForums.net saw a decline in natural search engine traffic. The indexed changes had and Google dropping a big chunk of pages (500), but Yahoo adding nearly 1,000. However, I’d rather have 500 Google pages than 1,000 Yahoo.
Again, this correlation between search engine traffic and indexed pages seems to fit together. But why did Starcraft2.net improve so much, and MMAForums.net worsen? Sc2.net is much newer and has a lot less posts, but the news of sc2 is starting to spread more. I’m not sure if this is part of the equation. What do you guys think?
MMAForums.net’s SERPS stayed roughly the same, except for Yahoo improving with a major jump from unlisted to the top 10 for the two most important keywords.
Overall
While it’s far too soon to conclude anything since search engines constantly update rankings, change algorithms, and spider pages, vBSEO seems have been working so far. Starcraft2.net had a fantastic increase, while MMAForums.net actually saw a decrease in traffic and indexed pages, but did have a couple of great SERP increases.
I almost wish now that I had conducted this test on 3 sites, but it is just too expensive to do so. Hopefully MMAForums.net will pick up and help to equalize the results. Because… if vBSEO can create that much of an increase for search engine traffic on a very small forum, imagine what it could do on PokerForums.org.
I’ll be back in another month for another update. It will be very interesting to see the results.
VBSEO is up and down for me. TBH I think forums will always stuggle to rank.
It goes up a lot and just drop a little bit
Very well written article. I just came here but I feel I have to subscribe to get next months report.
Case studies give more than usual theoretical “lessons” since it gives you a proper context. Very interesting.
Congrats on the increase for SC2. I’m certain you’ll see increases next month for MMAforums.net. I have had about a 500% increase in indexing on the largest forum I tested it on (250k+ posts) at the four month mark.
You’ll also likely top off your gains at about the 3 month mark because there won’t be anything left to index. At least that’s how it has gone in my case studies over at my blog.
[…] test cases with vBSEO on two different forums at once. My first month updated post can be viewed here. I’m interested in experienced vBSEO users’ thoughts as to why one site benefited and the other […]
The fact that SC2 forum didn’t have too many pages indexed makes only natural the increase (better URLs usually mean just that). On the other hand, the MMA forum, with already 4200 pages indexed is another story: a lot of pages are dropped from Google index (the older URLs) and the newer ones aren’t indexed as fast.
As for Google traffic, aside from the change in pages indexed and the relevance (the newer URLs don’t really have any relevance with Google yet), you have to take into consideration that August was the period of analysis: people play a lot more in this period of time (not going to school and the likes) so it is more probable that StarCraft search terms were much more sought for than MMA search terms 🙂
Hope it helped.
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