Bad days over now?
I’ve been real busy lately with forum jobs and running between some personal projects. Running out of time and getting myself sleeping on the keyboard at nite were not that bad, but watching the decreasing trend of the ads revenue was quite scary. Why yes? It’s a dedicated machine that the forum is in, and paying a pretty $270/month for the server is not a cheap deal.
Page loading time and time-out errors will effect your earnings. It’s true. First, it will chase your visitors away. Second, it will trigger out something bad to the ads crawlers, Mr MediaPartner Googlebot. At least, the bot will reporting it back to the base, “Ouch.. these pages are not accessible..”. You know the bots will be coming over and over not long after the ads are loaded. What happened when at 80% of times of the visits the server return the time-out errors? Surely it’s not a good treat and I believe publishers reputation also is the main key in the Google SmartPricing.
Little I know about vbulletin and the CentOS, and digging vbulletin.com for any related article was just worth the try. It’s about the CentOS and the Kernel, which according to the article, a little upgrade or downgrade of my current kernel version 2.6.9-22 will solve the high CPU usage issue. I did not take much time reading and requsted for a kernel upgrade, despite an advice from them that 2.6.9-39 is not a stable version. Who cares? I just want my forum up & running;)
I had my time previewing some good forum styles (members are demanding now 
), and customize it for the Advanced Warning System (AWS). Why need only a single skin? It’s all about customization and some ads hacking. I just don’t own enough time and energy to do them all..
Later I got myself a copy of VBSEO, a well-known hacks for the purpose of vbulletin search engine friendly forum. It’s a little expensive, nearly the same price of a vbulletin licence itself, but I can see some instant improvement with the SERPs. At the time of this posting, the pages indexed by Google is about 703, and I believe it’s an instant increase from 480 for the last few days. I can’t wait to witness a better figure next month.
Now the ads revenue is getting better, I don’t know which are contributing the most to it, whether the kernel upgrade for better CPU usage (loading & up time), or the VBSEO itself. As long as I can have enough return from ads for the purchase of VBSEO and server monthly rental, then I can have my own good times and peace of mind. Thanks to VBSEO and eva2000 from VBulletin Team.
More updates on the result coming soon..
