mykkal
05-24-2015, 12:57 AM
Is there a way to fix the vbulletin sitemap so that it returns the value of the Canonical Url? There is a thread on vBulletin.com which talks about vBulletin's SEO. It's actually against the grain as far as google webmaster tools is concerned.
For those that use htaccess to rewrite anything other than the default URL listings Vbulletin will make a sitemap contrary to the canonical URL resulting in a looping override of the canonical URL. The sitemap will say "these urls exist" and Google sees them as a preference. It will then send a robot to verify the page exist resulting in exposure to the canonical url. this cause google to drop references to the canonical URL as soon as the next sitemap is submitted. That is nightly for me.
The problem lies in /includes/class_sitemap.php.
Here is a word from Google expressingly stating not to do what vB functionality currently does:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
While we encourage you to use any of these methods, none of them are required. If you don't indicate a canonical URL, we'll identify what we think is the best version or URL.
Don't use the robots.txt file for canonicalization purposes.
Don't use the URL removal tool for canonicalization: it removes all versions of a URL from search.
Don't specify different URLs as canonical for the same page (e.g. one URL in a sitemap and a different URL for that same page using rel="canonical")
--------------- Added 1432502849 at 1432502849 ---------------
FYI i'm asking if there is a preexisting canonical reference other than using 'bburl'? I'm trying to edit code on line 797 of includes/class_sitemap.php to get vbulletin to pull the url rewrites we use as the url for the sitemap to write. We've got tens of thousands of linkbacks preexisting from the site being 7 years old. The rewrites we used were custom and vbulletin doesn't have an option that displays them that way. The canonical urls are already rewritten to reflect what our url rewrites in htacess are. If I can get this to work then we will not have anymore problems with Google Webmaster tools.
If you know of w way please let me know:
$content .= "\n\t" . '<loc>' . htmlspecialchars_uni($this->registry->options['bburl'] . '/xmlsitemap.php?fn=' . urlencode($sitemap['loc'])) . '</loc>';
For those that use htaccess to rewrite anything other than the default URL listings Vbulletin will make a sitemap contrary to the canonical URL resulting in a looping override of the canonical URL. The sitemap will say "these urls exist" and Google sees them as a preference. It will then send a robot to verify the page exist resulting in exposure to the canonical url. this cause google to drop references to the canonical URL as soon as the next sitemap is submitted. That is nightly for me.
The problem lies in /includes/class_sitemap.php.
Here is a word from Google expressingly stating not to do what vB functionality currently does:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
While we encourage you to use any of these methods, none of them are required. If you don't indicate a canonical URL, we'll identify what we think is the best version or URL.
Don't use the robots.txt file for canonicalization purposes.
Don't use the URL removal tool for canonicalization: it removes all versions of a URL from search.
Don't specify different URLs as canonical for the same page (e.g. one URL in a sitemap and a different URL for that same page using rel="canonical")
--------------- Added 1432502849 at 1432502849 ---------------
FYI i'm asking if there is a preexisting canonical reference other than using 'bburl'? I'm trying to edit code on line 797 of includes/class_sitemap.php to get vbulletin to pull the url rewrites we use as the url for the sitemap to write. We've got tens of thousands of linkbacks preexisting from the site being 7 years old. The rewrites we used were custom and vbulletin doesn't have an option that displays them that way. The canonical urls are already rewritten to reflect what our url rewrites in htacess are. If I can get this to work then we will not have anymore problems with Google Webmaster tools.
If you know of w way please let me know:
$content .= "\n\t" . '<loc>' . htmlspecialchars_uni($this->registry->options['bburl'] . '/xmlsitemap.php?fn=' . urlencode($sitemap['loc'])) . '</loc>';