Web Development

You might consider installing DBSEO by the DragonByte team.

It's currently in RC1 (release candidate 1) and is working pretty good... it still has a few minor bugs, but the support by the DB team has been good.

I think that is your best option.

after the nightmares I had with vbseo I am not going to use anything like it. every time a vbseo atttacks hit I was in vacation and every time my site was hit. one of the times I was at my daughters graduation from army basic training and except for the ceremony I was glued to computer trying to find it and clean it up, another time was when my mom passed away and I flew to the states. those 2 times stick in my head the most but their was a few other times.

The problem is that a busy site that was well established and popular had a lot of their links on other sites which pointed back to their web site. These were normally "good SEO" links (speaking in a pure white-hat SEO way), and if those links were "friendly URLs" created by vBSEO, then everyone of those links will have to be 301'ed back to the original forum format.

This is bad for SEO. There is no way around it... If your backlinks need to be 301'ed to get them to work; you will lose PR status with Google and SEO will suffer.

If you are willing to take this SEO hit and have all your vBSEO backlinks 301'ed back to your original forum format, then that's up to you; but many would deem that approach, in the long term, unwise.

Elrond: So this is your purpose, to enter the mountain?
Thorin Oakenshield: What of it?
Elrond: There are some who would not deem it wise.

thanks neo guess I need to do some more research. as I said vbseo left a really bad taste and was a total nightmare for me for many years and finally got where enough was enough. besides it happening each vacation each time of course you had to update your contract to get the updates to protect your site. I have been reading about dragonbyte and they actually wanted me to reinstall vbseo and then they work off that. trust factor is not their. I actually believe a lot of the exploits with vbseo were initiated by them to get people to renew, not positive on this but I always wondered, I have never been hit with any of the vbulletin exploits and got every single one of the vbseo exploits just before they announced them

Franky, I was never a fan of the vBSEO team and their approach to customers and customer support. Then, fast forward ahead to their very poor practice of just shutting down without providing any support to their existing users. That was a problem with vBSEO and Crawability, not SEO software in general.

DragonByte is a different company, different people, and it was actually kind of them to support vB3 SEO; and they have been good to work with; very helpful, responsive and caring.

So, it's not really fair to lament about Crawalibility and vBSEO and their unprofessional practices in the same post as talking about DragonByte and DBSEO, who apparently approach customer support in a much more professional way.

However, if you are not a coder and not comfortable with managing servers, software and IT in general, it's really best you move off of vB3 because this software has been "end of life" for a long time, and if you are not a coder, you will meet many dragons in the future.

That's why it's a tough living, running a forum when you are not comfortable with software and coding. If you cannot code yourself, you have to pay to have it done, and IT people who are skilled are expensive.

Best of luck my friend.

you are probably right neo. just got in from a quick dive in front of my condo. i do my best thinking when i have my tanks on and underwater. most relaxing thing in the world. lots to think about, i was in no way trying to trash dragon it may be a great product, i will be watching to see and take my time to make a decision. saw about a 7 foot giant green moray eel as big around as my leg, its been a good day. thank you again for all your advice neo it is really appreciated

neo i would like to thank you, you gave me the direction i needed to get things fixed which i got the htaccess correct. you all have a heck of a great site and i just wanted to say thanks!