“One of the many benefits that FeedBurner publishers will enjoy now that FeedBurner is part of the Google family is a little something we like to call, “more for free!” Beginning today, two of FeedBurner’s previously for-pay services, TotalStats and MyBrand, will be free. Not in the sense of soaring high above the clouds or recently sprung from the hoosegow, but free like you’ll no longer gladly be billed on Tuesday for a burned feed today. We suspect this will be welcome news to the 450,000+ of you using many of our other free services, but understanding that your feed is your feed, you will need to activate these newly freed-up services in order to partake in their awesomeness.”

If you haven’t read about it yet, two previously paid features at feedburner are now free! So I set up my free feedburner account and created a posts and commments feed at feedburner. I then used the wordpress plugin feedsmith to forward all of my blogs RSS feeds to my newly created feeds. The whole process took less than fifteen minutes to read about, install and set up. What I like the most about feedburner is the ability to view highly detailed stats for free. I’m not sure if I’ll use their “MyBrand” free feature yet or not, as I feel fine simply using a URL at feedburner; however, I may change the feed at a later date.

Hey, now that I’ve mentioned my new feed why don’t you subscribe to it?

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Another week of small gains for this week’s vBSEO update for HaloBoards:

site:haloboards.com (Google) up 100 to 28,400

site:haloboards.com (Yahoo) up 277 to 13,360

site:haloboards.com (MSN) up 6 to 154

I think this just another calm week before the storm of additional search engine results. Time will tell, but I’m still very impressed with how well vBSEO has improved indexing my vBulletin forum content. Next week will be an exciting update as it will make the two month mark since the installation of vBSEO. One thing I have to factor into the figures between HaloBoards and GamingVidz is the lower number of posts HaloBoards has, so I think that GamingVidz will always have more results than HaloBoards.

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Here are the numbers for Week 12 - the exciting three month mark - on my ongoing case study of vBSEO’s affects on forum search engine indexing and sending traffic from search engines. We saw a little drop in Google’s numbers this week, but a gain with Yahoo. Because this is a month mark in the case study I have also provided graphs from Google Analytics that highlight the traffic sources for GamingVidz. First lets start with the search engine results numbers for the week:

site:gamingvidz.com (Google) down 9,000 to 217,000

site:gamingvidz.com (Yahoo) down 1,112 to 24,256

site:gamingvidz.com (MSN) up 6 to 135

This week showed downward fluctuations that I’m not too concerned about after seeing the monumental gains from recent updates. The real pupose of this case study is to see how much search engine traffic is sent to GamingVidz.com with vBSEO’s help. The following graphs are from the “new” Google Analytics and highlight the various traffic sources and their share of the pie graph for GamingVidz. As you can see as a whole direct traffic has gone down; however, this always occurs on GamingVidz.com as the summer months bring less time inside watching videos and more time outside or on vacation for my members. With that in mind, here are the numbers thus far (pay attention to the search engine traffic chunk):

April 2nd to April 9th (Pre vBSEO installation - only one week of data)

April 10th to May 7th (1 month after vBSEO installation)

May 8th to June 4th (2 months after vBSEO installation)

June 5th to July 2nd (3 months after vBSEO installation)

Twelve weeks ago GamingVidz started with only 34,300 results and in three months vBSEO increased search engine results for a site:gamingvidz.com search by 173,700. It took GamingVidz nearly two years to reach 34,300 results and in only three months vBSEO has increased search engine results by more than 5x what we started with. As the graphs also show there has a substantial increase in organic search engine traffic as well! I know I’ve said it before, but I couldn’t be more pleased with my vBSEO license purchases and I recommend purchasing one for your vBulletin forums as well.

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