first off i want to thank you for such a great site, you helped me narrow down a long search on what was wrong with my forum, i have a large forum motorbicycling DOT com which i had someone remove vbseo before they went under because of all the security problems. anyway i have lots of 404 errors that are .html and from what i am reading it seems my rewrite rules might not have been redone or something i am not really sure. i am older and they invented calculators when i was in school so not to good with computers. also since my removal of vbseo my seo has dropped considerably. can you please recommend someone to hire (hopefully neo) to look over and fix what is needed. also its great to see i am not the only one that has stuck with vb3. everyone i have talked to has told me i need to update to 4 and with the great seo you all have i know without a doubt that vb4 is not necessary. thank you!
paul
Hello atcpaul,
Thank you for your kind words about our forums; actually we like vB3 much better than vB4 or vB5... it's cleaner, less bloated and does not suffer from so much "feature creep" and the "me too" social syndrome which vB4 and vB5 suffer from.
Regarding vBSEO, actually the way that group shut down their web site and ended support was ethically and morally wrong. Crawability (vbSEO) just abandoned many well established Internet communities without any transition plan; and just turned off their forum which had a lot of information we needed; and they also just shutdown a web site which was needed by their software to do a license check. What they did was completely irresponsibility and totally inexcusable; and they are lucky their former customers did take them to court for negligence.
Anyway, "never mind" vBSEO and their company and people. They harmed a lot of people; good riddance. Karma is real, so they will get what they deserve, we don't need to waste time over such a failed company and group of people. Move on!
Regarding requesting "my assistance", well, this year I am fully committed to this site and to our moderators, forum advisory team and our members; we have a lot to do in this community to support the 2.5 to 3 Million visitors we have each month and to support our community members who give their time to help others.
Having said that, our community can always use extra money to play for hosting, software, graphics, etc - so if you *really* need my help, the cost for Neo (me) to help you "hands on for your forum" is $2000 USD paid in advance to our forum paypal account.
For this $2000 USD, you will get up to 10 hours of my time in helping you with your site; and all the proceeds of that $2000 will go toward our forums this year. More than likely I'll just share most of it with our moderation and admin team!
I know it sounds like a lot to you, so don't worry if you don't want to contribute $2000 USD for my time. It's perfectly OK by me; as I am fully committed to our community this year!
Best of luck in 2014 and thank you again for the kind words!
thank you neo. actually cannot afford that much at this time. I had paid someone to remove vbseo and was told it would take a hit on seo so I expected it and now I know I should not have taken the kind of hit I did but that is water under the bridge and I need to move on to fix it. reason I believe it is leftover from vbseo is I am getting lots of not found errors with .html on them. I understand your commitment to your site and admire you guys hard work shows. if you ever head this way let me know, we got phenomenal diving here in the virgin islands. a wall that drops to 12,100 feet. first 120 feet of it is amazing 
Cheers!
Likewise; and you are always welcome to ask specific technical questions here free of charge on SEO or any topic related to unix and linux-based servers and services.
thanks neo, I am learning a lot from your site. keep up the good work
Thanks.
I assume you saw my earlier thread on vBSEO already?
yes I have read it and going to read it again tonight after work. most of the things are above my head. I am still learning daily however I am not very computer literate at all, I have in the past always had someone do my updates. I know how to do basic things like simple ad on and most of the vbulletin admin functions. I have a dedicated server and only thing I have done their is upload photo's and basic stuff like that. I have crashed the forum more then once by getting in over my head so I am pretty cautious anymore lol
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!