Hello vBSEO Friends and Customers, we are happy to announce that vBSEO 3.6.0 Gold is now Gold and is available to all licensed users for installation on production servers with full support. You may download vBSEO 3.6 now from the downloads area for any active license.

Featuring the Likes Tree, updated Social Bookmarking System, Universal CDN Integration + MaxCDN Promo!

NOTE: Please read this announcement completely and carefully, as there are certain restrictions, changes to rules, and other important items that you should know about before jumping into 3.6. Pay special attention to the *Important* flag.

vBSEO 3.6.0 Gold Highlights

1. A full featured “Likes” system: A “Social Graph” for your community
The long-awaited Likes Tree integration is now available! Made popular by Facebook, and now making its way to forums and social web applications everywhere, the “Likes” system allows your users to effortlessly provide feedback to one another on the content they find most useful. Most importantly, this activity creates an underlying layer of data that works as a “Social Graph” for your community, opening the doors to a myriad of USEFUL features that have the potential to alter the way we interact with forums in different ways. One of them is enabling people to find the site’s most useful content more efficiently (see our “Likes Tree” feature below). Another powerful use for this data is the ability to surface the most popular and/or relevant content for search engines, be it via Search Engine Friendly pages that list this content, or by using it as priority multipliers for your Search Engine XML sitemaps (coming in vBSEO Search Engine XML Sitemaps 3.1).

2. The vBSEO “Likes Tree”: Redefining the way people interact with forums
It gives you (and your users) an instant “birds-eye-view” of the “Likes” distribution in a thread, allowing you to *quickly* identify the most useful/important content, no matter how long the conversation is. This new feature represents a new paradigm as it allows people to extract more value out of forums in less time.

3. Updated Social Bookmarking and Sharing system
The vBSEO Bookmarks system has been highly improved. It now appears as a pop-out link in the post bit to save space and better fit the postbit layout.

Important: With this update, the format for custom urls for your Social Bookmarking Icons has been modified. CURRENT CUSTOM ENTRIES WILL NOT BE CONVERTED. You will need to manually edit any custom rules.

Old Format:
Bookmark URL,Icon URL,”Bookmark Thread” Text,”Bookmark Post” Text

New Format:
Bookmark URL,Icon URL,”Bookmark Thread” Text,”Bookmark Post” Text,”Bookmark article” Text

See this post for more information on what formats to use.

4. CDN integration and MaxCDN Promo! – Faster Sites = Better SEO
Now for the first time ever, it is easy to set up your vBSEO-powered vBulletin forum to work with a CDN. Search Engines will love you and your users will love you too. It has been proven that sites that load FASTER, rank HIGHER. vBSEO has partnered with MaxCDN to bring faster load speeds to our clients. *New licenses* will receive an account at MaxCDN, valid for 1TB of bandwidth or 1 year of usage (whichever comes first). The package is valued at $39.95 and is being made available for FREE to vBSEO users who *purchase* a new license or *renew* an existing license (limited to ONE 1TB account per-customer). vBSEO 3.6.0 now features an easy (Universal) CDN integration via our dashboard settings panel.

Important: Certain restrictions Apply. Please read the following carefully.

1. 1 trial account per customer, regardless of how many licenses you have. You may use a single account for multiple sites though.
2. Details on how to claim your MaxCDN account will be presented to you at time of your FIRST purchase after this promotion goes into effect on your confirmation page. Print or write them down.
3. Important: You must follow the steps AT TIME OF ORDER ONLY. No exceptions.
4. Important: Staff cannot assist you with your MaxCDN account creation if you forgot to do it, or did it incorrectly. Your account will be marked as a CDN account holder and, any other new order will NOT invoke the promotional item again. Please do not open any tickets about this, as there is absolutely nothing we can do to change this. It is one-time, at time of order, only. If you get stuck or have problems, leave your purchase confirmation window open, launch a new tab/window in your browser to open a ticket/thread with any questions you may have BEFORE closing your order confirmation page.
5. Important: MaxCDN is a subscription-based product which has it’s own billing system outside of the vBSEO ordering system. You will be prompted to enter a credit/debit card, or PayPal* account to put on file with MaxCDN. Credit/Debit card users will NOT be billed. PayPal Customers will be charged $0.99 to cover the PayPal minimum transaction amount.
6. *NOTE: The PayPal payment option will not be available until mid-day Monday, 3/14/2011.
7. If you do not agree to these terms, you are not required to participate and can simply navigate away from the order confirmation page. If you accept these terms, please be aware that after your 1TB of bandwidth is used, or 1 year of service (which ever comes first), you will be billed by MaxCDN based on this payment information per their terms of service at their current regular prices at time of billing. If you do not wish to be billed, you may cancel your CDN service at any time before your 1 year or 1TB of transfer is used up. MaxCDN will contact you previous to the expiry of your PROMO period indicating when it’s going to expire, allowing you enough time to cancel the service shall you desire to do so. All MaxCDN account-related items are available to you in the MaxCDN dashboard: MaxCDN Control Panel.
8. If you are a current MaxCDN customer, you can still take advantage of this free promo item, however, you must make a new account via our ordering portal flow. Your current account will not be converted.
9. Past purchases, including those made just minutes before this announcement, unfortunately do not apply. A new purchase with our back end system in place is required in order to automate the process. You can renew for the future year even if you are not expired to obtain the free promotional item. All future-date renewals apply to the date of expiration, not order date.
10. MaxCDN is solely responsible for the CDN service and their servers. Our support will only offer help on problems with integration of the service in their vBSEO CP. Any technical issues with the CDN itself should be brought to the attention of MaxCDN through their authorized support channels.

The Free MaxCDN account promotion may be offered for a limited time only and is subject to termination without notice.

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Here is some info from vBSEO along with a couple screenshots.

When we first introduced the Likes Tree concept a few weeks ago, it was a vision, a dream… something that seemed cool, and perhaps useful for those seeking to browse threads more efficiently.

The title of the original thread was: The “Likes Tree”, finding a forum’s most useful content will change forever…. and, although I do agree this title is accurate today, I was in for a surprise to the feature’s TRUE *usefulness*.

In a nutshell, I believe this feature will REDEFINE the way people interact with forums. It has done that for me, and I’m happy to announce that as of right now, all vBSEO.com users will be able to experience it for themselves!

While conducting our initial tests (admins have had the feature enabled for a few days now) we quickly realized the underlying data was SO powerful, that it would be a waste not to put it to work in areas other than enabling the discovery of a thread’s most meaningful content. That is the long way of saying that some really powerful stuff is coming from vBSEO, and the “Likes Tree” is *only* the first of those features. SEO is at the core of these enhancements, and that’s why this feature is 100% relevant to vBSEO.

The *first embodiment* of the “Likes Tree” now includes filters that enable users to:

1. Find a thread’s “Top” liked posts in chronological order
2. Find “All” liked posts in a thread, by author, i.e. the “Likes Distribution” of a thread
3. Find the distribution of likes within “This Page” (a singe page of a thread)

The final implementation is quite different to the original iteration, due to both, technical limitations and performance considerations, as well as a number of *extra values* that became obvious to us during the initial testing phase.

Below two screenshots, the first is for the initial feature as spec’d:

… and here is the final implementation, after a number of closed dev iterations:

This is still in the early beta stages, but vBSEO has announced they release it to the pre-release team, so I’ve applied for that and hopefully it’ll be running on General Forums soon!

If you’re a vBSEO customer is this something you’ll enable on your forum? If you’re not than is this something that would help convince to you that vBSEO is a quality product and a vBulletin forum shouldn’t be started with out it?

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• optimized vbulletin
• optimized vbseo

If you know anything about me, you’ll know that I ran a vBulletin powered forum for many years and just recently sold it. I’ll try to outline a few of the reasons why I “switched to the dark side” and setup an Invision Powered Services forum. The number one reason I would have even considered sticking with vBulletin is the vBSEO product. IPB does have SEO mods but they just don’t seem to match up to the power that vBSEO brings to the vBulletin platform. With that being said, I made a thread on the IPB support forums titled “How to SEO our IPB forum” I’ve picked up a few tips which I’ve implemented on my IPBSetup forum, but there has to be a few more options I haven’t found yet.

I didn’t have a problem at first with the buyout of Jelsoft to internet brands, but after seeing all the old developers leave and the drastic changes that have taken place; I see why people were getting so upset over it. I like how Invision actually uses their CMS for their homepage, vBulletin just has some generic html pages up which do look good, but it’s not showcasing the ability of their suit when they are pushing hard for sales. I had a chance to do some early beta testing on vBulletin and boy did it have a lot of bugs. I know it was in beta but I would of thought some of the major issues would be been fixed in development, it seems they just want to push something out and make it appear as if they care about the end forum user. I think they are really just interested in their own network (iNet) but I could be wrong and I hope I am because I still have a lot of friends that use vBulletin for their forums.

One thing I really like about IPB and wish vBulletin would consider adding this to their lineup is the search box in the admin control panel of IPB. You know how on yahoo if you start typing something you’ll get a dropdown box with suggestions? You’ll find the same thing in the IPB admincp area; it’s been very helpful for me since I don’t know my way around IPB yet.

I don’t think it will be long and IPB will be the #1 forum software for professionals, especially the way iNET is running Jelsoft. I do wish everyone the best, I still love vBulletin but IPB is climbing up with every chance I get to mess around and figure things out. My next big purchase is going to be IP.Content and I’ll have a tightly integrated CMS that will match my forum. This is something I had always wanted from vBulletin and even with the new vBCMS, it just doesn’t fulfill my needs like IP.Content will.

What are some things you like about vBulletin over IPB or IPB over vBulletin? I look forward to your comments. This is a dofollow blog, so search engines will spider your links.

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• Installed vBSEO & Optimized it
• Optimized the vBulletin forum

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• moved attachments to the ftp, along with avatars and profile pics
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Here is the short list… ps, this site looks great and really shows what can be done with vBulletin, keeping everything simple.

• optimized vBulletin
• updated and optimzied vbseo

This one was really put together well, very nice design.. a nice site to work on

• optimized vbulletin
• updated vbseo + optimized
• general maintenance

• upgraded vbulletin
• upgraded vbseo
• upgraded vbadvanced
• installed spam mods
• added custom rss plugin as well
• might do more link building work later on.

I choose vBulletin for a number of reasons, one being the upgrades. As I previously mentioned, I had used phpBB before switching to vBulletin. I hated updating all the php files when you needed to do an upgrade on a modded phpBb forum. I’m not sure if the current version of phpBB has easier upgrades, but I’d had enough of phpBB. Time for vBulletin the professional forum script; I had looked at IPB (the other paid alternative) but was not impressed with the actual look of the forum from a users point of view. I used vBulletin for the first 9 months and it was great, then they released the plugin and product system which allowed mods to be with one upload and a click of a button. The product/plugin addition also made the upgrades much easier. You could update a fully modded forum in a matter of seconds, you still need to update each of the templates but you’re still saving time of updating php files.

One of the great addons for vBulletin is a product called vBSEO. vBulletin Search Engine Optimization in one single product. You can do a number of the tweaks that vBSEO does with other addons, but you can’t do everything and who really wants to install 20 hacks to take the place of one? Not to mention the strain 20 hacks will have on your forum and that’s just 20 more chances for a security exploit. vBSeo is the #1 SEO script for vBulletin, I will not start a forum without it. Even if it’s a very small forum, and low on funds, you have to take every advantage that you can in optimizing your forum for search engines.

So if you want the best forum possible, you’ll want vBulletin and vBSEO. Now we can talk a little about hosting. You should be able to get a good host for less than $10 a month to start off. Then as your site goes, you’ll need to extend your hosting packageto cover the traffic and bandwidth that your site will be consuming. If you want to host several sites, you may want to look into a VPS or virtual private server. That’s what I use on my websites it allows me total control that your shared hosting plans aren’t going to give you.

I hope I’ve explained a few things here, feel free to ask any questions. I’ll be posting some articles on building back links and advertising for your forums in the near future. If you do need any help setting up your vBulletin forum or would like to talk on the phone and brainstorm topics for your forum, you can contact me at my Professional vBulletin Services pages on one of my other blogs.

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http://www.CrowdGather.com

This forum owner had an older forum that I had done some work on a year ago.
and he came back for a new forum he’s working on, lets see what’s been done on Stock Market Cats.

• updated vbseo
• tweaked vbseo and vbulletin
• did a small link campaign added links in 2 wordpress tyles that were submitted for 100 wp theme sites.

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Bloggeries is quickly becoming one of my regular forums that I visit. I helped out the owner by

• upgraded the forum to 3.7
• tweaked the vbseo and optimized the forum
• upgraded vbseo
• added a few hacks

True2Ourselves is a sharp looking site, they’ve integrated a few script from what I could see.

Here is the list of vBulletin work..

• vBulletin optimization
• vBSEO tweaking
• removed the site name from forumdisplay, showthread
• looked over the rest of the site for major “leaks”

* optimized the entire vBulletin forum
* installed and optimize vBSEO
* did keyword research and competition research
* built backlinks or in the process of building links up for a long term campaign
* general maintenance

* optimized the entire vBulletin forum
* installed and optimize vBSEO
* did keyword research and competition research
* built backlinks or in the process of building links up for a long term campaign
* general maintenance

My Golf Party forum is the first golf site that I think I’ve worked on. I really like the style and logo.
on to the list…

• updated vBSEO
• optimized vBSEO
• optimized vBulletin, moved attachments into a file system and removed the Caps in the url’s

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