vBSEO Case Study 2-Month Update
September 26, 2007 Posted by Tyler CruzIt has now been two months since I started my case study on the popular vBulletin product vBSEO by purchasing two licenses and running them on two of my sites.
My first update was made 3-weeks after the start of the study, and it produced very interesting results.
Here are the latest stats. They 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 first parentheses is the change since the previous calculation, and the data in the second parentheses is the change since the beginning of the study:
Starcraft2.net
Traffic:
Starting Data:
Google Organic: 211
Yahoo Organic: 50
August 21 – September 21
Google Organic: 798 (-66) (+587)
Yahoo Organic: 21 (-165) (-29)
Indexed Pages:
Starting Data:
Google: 92
MSN: 25
Yahoo/Fast/AltaVista: 94
August 21 – September 21
Google: 569 (+151) (+477)
MSN: 85 (+31) (+60)
Yahoo/Fast/AltaVista: 464 (+365) (+370)
SERP Results:
– = Not in the first 200 results
G = Google
M = MSN
Y = Yahoo!
“Search Term” [Original] [Last Ranking] [Current Ranking]
“starcraft 2″ [G – M — Y 31] [G 37 M 31 Y 94] [G 24 M 20 Y 133]
“starcraft2″ [G — M — Y 24] [G 8 M 7 Y 8] [G 8 M 7 Y 20]
“starcraft forums” [G 79 M — Y 9] [G 44 M 8 Y 17] [G 20 M 8 Y 61]
“starcraft forum” [G — M — Y 7] [G – M 81 Y 16] [G — M 58 Y 21]
“starcraft2 forum” [G 37 M 81 Y 4] [G 32 M 1 Y 2 ] [G 37 M 1 Y 2]
“starcraft2 forums” [G 46 M — Y 1] [G 68 M 1 Y 4] [G 50 M 1 Y 17]
“starcraft 2 forums” [G 48 M — Y 4] [G 52 M 3 Y 12] [G 31 M 5 Y 26]
“starcraft” [G — M — Y –] [G — M 115 Y –] [G — M 93 Y –]
MMAForums.net
Traffic:
Starting Data:
Google Organic: 2349
Yahoo Organic: 33
August 21 – September 21
Google Organic: 4217 (+2013) (+1868)
Yahoo Organic: 43 (+10) 130 (+87) (+97)
Indexed Pages:
Starting Data:
Google: 4,230
MSN: 94
Yahoo/Fast/AltaVista: 3,094
August 21 – September 21
Google: 2820 (-860) (-1410)
MSN: 149 (+66) (+55)
Yahoo/Fast/AltaVista: 5454 (+1368) (+2360)
SERP Results:
– = Not in the first 200 results
G = Google
M = MSN
Y = Yahoo!
“Search Term” [Original] [Last Ranking] [Current Ranking]
“mma forums” [G 4 M — Y 57] [G 3 M — Y 7] [G 3 M — Y 6]
“mma forum” [G 32 M – Y 126] [G 7 M 93 Y 8] [G 7, M 74 Y 6]
“ufc forums” [G 17 M — Y –] [G 16 M – Y –] [G — M – Y –]
“mma” [G 111 M — Y –] [G 128 M — Y –] [G 104 M — Y –]
Monthly Summary
Starcraft2.net
Oddly, Starcraft2.net had an increase in indexed pages across all three search engines, yet its organic went down a bit from the previous month. Now, this could certainly be due to ‘hype’, with the original announcement of Starcraft 2 becoming forgotten and thus yielding less search queries.
For SERPS, Google continued to show a good improvement, while Yahoo actually worsened a fair bit for all queries for some reason. MSN stayed about the same. However, I’m now almost on page 2 for “starcraft 2” on Google which is nice.
Since Starcraft 2 was announced shortly before the forum was developed, there was a lot of hype on the Internet about it. Starcraft2.net is also a brand new forum making the results very hard to evaluate or compare against anything. Thus, it wasn’t the best candidate to use as a case study, but I will continue to monitor it to see how things pan out.
MMAForums.net
Last update I was curious why Starcraft2.net had seen a large boost in Google organic traffic but MMAForums.net hadn’t. It seems that MMAForums.net has caught up this time around, boasting an impressive increase of 2013 more uniques from Google! That’s about than 65 more uniques per day that Google is giving me. What makes me optimistic that this came as a result from vBSEO is that MMAForums.net, unlike SC2.net, is over a year old and there has been no events in the world to suggest such a great improvement in search engine traffic.
This is really where we need to find out if this came as a result from vBSEO, and if so, if it will stay. Because if it does, then it should prove without a doubt that vBSEO is worth its $150 pricetag.
For indexed pages, Google actually dropped a lot of pages, while Yahoo added about the same number Google dropped. This is rather confusing/interesting.
MMAForums.net’s SERPS remained the same, which makes me wonder how so much more organic Google traffic came with Google actually dropped the number of indexed pages. Perhaps a lot of traffic is coming from small keyword phrases, or perhaps there was simply a worldwide increase in search engine traffic for MMA?
Overall
While it’s still too early to conclude anything since search engines constantly update rankings, change algorithms, and index pages, vBSEO seems to have been working so far. While SERPS and indexed pages have been jumping up and down, overall both sites have had a nice increase of organic search engine traffic, which in the end is really the only thing that matters.
I’m currently considering buying two more vBSEO licenses and running them on MovieForums.org and PokerForums.org. MovieForums.org is currently growing at a great rate, and so vBSEO could benefit it’s growth even more. The downside is that it would be more difficult to evaluate vBSEO’s effect on it since it’s currently already increasing in growth and traffic. However, it has been #3 on Google for “movie forums” for a while, so if vBSEO can improve it’s traffic without needing to improve on that term, then it will really be saying something.
As for PokerForums.org, that’s a VERY big decision for me. PokerForums accounts for the majority of my income, and most of my traffic comes from Google, where I’ve ranked 1-2 for “poker forums” for years. It’s dangerous whereby vBSEO might possibly have my rank decrease for that term, which could be the difference in tens of thousands of dollars. On the other hand, if it increases my traffic, it could… again… be the difference of tens of thousands of dollars.. only this time in the green 🙂
So it’s a difficult choice that I’m still not sure about yet.
I’ll be back in another month for another update. It will be very interesting to see the results.
6 Responses to “vBSEO Case Study 2-Month Update”
[…] I just did another update, 2 months in. It is VERY detailed with all the numbers you could ask for. I’d be interested in hearing people’s thoughts and predictions too: vBSEO Case Study 2-Month Update TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur’s Journey […]
Not a bad result at all. Is the price of vBSEO being justified by the results?
It’s too early to tell, but if you say that vBSEO gave me 2,000 more uniques a month, then obviously yes 🙂 That’s $150 for 24,000 uniques a year.
But again, it’s too early to tell. Will this number increase even more? Will it drop?
Wait for another vBSEO post I’ll be posting in a day or two which will be __VERY__ interesting.
[…] after the start of the study, and it produced very interesting results. My second update was made 2-months later and while data was still new and inconclusive, it started to lean towards both sites showing a nice […]
hi, andar here, i just read your post. i like very much. agree to you, sir.
Interesting article Tyler. I’m thinking of purchasing a vbSEO license but I am just starting to look at the product itself. I do not derive any income off my forum but I do want to see an increase in traffic and on the SERPs. The $150 vbSEO price has kept me from buying it right now. I might end up doing that but I am not sure.
It sounds like the results have been somewhat mixed but the increased pages being indexed is quite interesting. That is one thing I am looking for.
Thanks for your article and keep up the good work. 🙂