1. That same information would probably be distilled from the content of the post/thread and a decent optimized page title without the need for mod_rewrite.

2. The majority of forum thread titles are so vague or generic or badly misspelled that the keyword-URL derived from them are virtually useless anyway.

Sample of recent threads on one large vBulletin forum:

And another large webmaster forum:

These are taken from "Today's Posts" on two vBulletin forums, edited only to remove thread titles that might identify the forum.

How many of those are going to convert to useful keyword URLs? Yes, a few perhaps... How many of those would be indexed for those same keywords from the content alone? How many others would yield better keywords from the content alone?

I understand that the SEO benefits of rewriting forum thread urls is very debatable - I was pointing out an unrelated benefit for real human people rather.

Very often Joe Public won't take your links and give them good context, they'll be copy-pasted asis. For people reading those links pasted to other sites or in a blog, before clicking on it, a showthread link gives me no idea where I'll end up other than the domain and "it's a forum".

A rewritten url offers extra human readable clues BEFORE BEING CLICKED through to the page to discover the pagetitle or content.
It also reassures the copy-paster that they've pasted the correct link.


I was merely pointing out that SEO isn't the be all and end all reasoning behind rewriting obscure thread id number urls, people-friendly urls are as important to me as search-engine-friendly :)

...which I don't think will make the slightest difference to human visitors. They are going to click on links from a search engine and what will determine those links is a combination of how far down the list the link is and the snippet.

Nobody will remember anything except the domain and tld (forum.com) anyway.

mod_rewrite has its uses, primarily if the software you're usiing creates search-engine-UNfriendly URLs - vBulletin does not do that out-of-the-box so the impact of mod_rewrite is extra server load and little else - except for creating additional things that can go wrong, which is likely the case with the poster where I raised the issue in the first place.

Not quite the answer I was looking for.. but thanks.

Anyone else? Please?

your still thinking "search engines" when my poor writing was trying to avoid that.
Lots of important links to your site will (hopefully!) be posted in blogs, other forums, on folks' myspaces, sent via email, etc. In those cases a human-friendly url can be to your benefit in my opinion. Whether that or other considerations outweigh the server load impact will depend on a site by site basis.

This is slightly off-topic of specifically Zoints SEO though, oops :$



merging has always worked fine with me using Zoints SEO - although to narrow it down you could try switching off the url rewriting temporarily and try merging, find out if that is what's causingthe trouble or if it's something else

i just want to know wether can we revert all urls to normal php form without any problem caused to forum normal work?
i am using zoints seo from last 3 months it works nice ,but the problem is that all the post including some post made by admins in private forums are also starting to be visible in google :( , all my member profiles are also visible in google too,
thats so annoying to me :(
can i revert /remove zoints and bring forum back to normal?
please reply me

i think there should be an on/off switch in your vbulletin options

yes but it stops future urls not past ( i think)

Getting the error Ne idea what to be done ?

I've installed the mod and everything works awesome, thanks!

I am trying to get the mod_rewrite to work but it will not. I keep getting a 404 Not Found when I try to use the mod_rewrite rule. Any ideas? I am sure mod_rewrite is on in the apache config because my Word Press uses it with no problems, I also have my own rewrite rule on another site.

Apache 1.3.x

If you have mod_rewrite for a while, and decide you don't want to use it - how detrimental would it be? Because I've had it for many months now - but I'm thinking about removing it.

well, you can unintall Zoins SEO but you should keep a .htaccess file that redirects all rewritten URLS (wich may be listed in Search engines and linked in your users postings as well) to the normal URLs.

Doing this you won't have any negative consequences (except from the SEO aspect..)

Honestly, is there any benefit of Zoints SEO right now? Besides debatable opinions on rewriting the urls?

Yes, definitely.

I don't use (or recommend) mod_rewrite but I have Zoints SEo installed for several other features, including funneling the home page URL, customized description tags, and several others.

I use zoints SEO and I think recently my Google results are jumping up very quickly.. within a month went from 0/10 to 3/10 on PR

Zoints SEO is beneficial in a lot of ways but it does NOT affect PageRank.

PageRank is strictly a measure of the number and quality of incoming links to the page.

can u please tell me exactly what has to be done with .htacess file, b cos when i remove seo hack whole my forum goes down and no page can be accessed until i re install it:(

There's a reason the add-on comes with this warning:

This is especially true for using mod_rewrite.

I suggest you go to http://network.zoints.com/

If i install this will there be any errors occuring. Please anyone tell me your experience on this. I have a vb of V3.6.5

If you follow all the instructions correctly, it shouldn't be a problem - it's working fine for me for vBulletin version 3.65.

1. There is a known conflict with vBGooglemaps - there is a fix for that however.

2. I recommend that you do NOT enable "seo friendly URLs" aka mod_rewrite. You really don't need it with vBulletin, it really won't help, and the majority of issues people have with this add-on are because of the use of mod_rewrite.

Rewriting the URLs won't work for me, causes 500 internal server errors on my server. Dunno if mod_rewrite is enabled or not, but then the second option should still work, right?

Ah well.

Did anyone apply this Zoints SEO mod for Cyb - Advanced Forum Statistics ?

Thanks

The rewriting links in the sitemap doesn't work, how can I make them work ?

http://ituto.informatique-13.com/forums/sitemap/

error 404

Help me plz

and how do we do so the "?" are replaced to "e" ?

les-r-gles-f22.html -> /les-regles-f22.html

is anyone using this with the new 3.6.7 ? just want to make sure there are no reported issues before upgrading my board...

i think on 3.6.7PL1 is working .... without any errors ...

so 3.6.7 is safe?

Yes.

No animals were harmed in the production of 3.67 or 3.67PL1.

There are no documented serious injuries, health hazards, or deaths as a result of using 3.67 or 3.67PL1.

Reports of alien abductions of individuals who have installed 3.67 or 3.67PL1 appear to have been seriously exaggerated.

pimping :) i really wish you guys would support this mod as it really rocks!

once you get it setup, do you really need support ?

What makes you think it isn't supported? See the Zoints Support Forum.

No, you don't, really. But considering that you've repeatedly used the argument that there IS no support for Zoints as part of your argument for pushing vBSEO, I'm a little surprised to see YOu posting that.

I am running this on 3.6.7PL1 with no problems so far.

Spoke too soon....when I click a link in the archive to visit a post, I get a 404. Example...

http://www.marshmarauders.org/forums/archive/t-430.html

Too tired to fool with it now lol.

!. Turn off mod-rewrite. vBulletin doesn't need it.

2. Admin CP | vBulletin Options | Search Engine Friendly Archive - Display Simple View of Threads = NO (By default, threads in the Archive are displayed in a simple manner. Set this to no to have the real threads linked from the archive.)

#2 will also help you with duplicate content issues.

Ok, thanks for the reply. I went in and double-checked zSEO, and I never had url rewrites on, it's always been off.

I went and did #2, then turned zSEO back on, still the same thing. 404 error because the links to threads in the archive are being changed. When I turn zSEO off, they are back to normal again and working. Must be a setting in zSEO that is causing it, but I definitely have url re-writes OFF.

djbaxter, I have concluded NOT to use url-rewriting based on your posts and other research. But I'm not hear to debate that.

I was wondering, since I'm new to SEO and there is a disclaimer above that says
Would you mind listing out the recommended settings for key settings in Zoints SEO? Would really help out a newbie. If it's too much effort, I understand, but thought I'd ask anyway. ;)

See below.

Here are my settings, although you may want some additional settings - other than mod_rewrite, I don't think you can do a lot of damage with the add-on:

Thanks dj! I copied your settings and turned zSEO on and it worked, I tracked the archive post links problem down to the "Use Archive as Sitemap" setting. When set to NO, the URL's to the archive posts are changed. Set back to YES, they are normal and work fine now with zSEO on.

Thanks again!

Great! Happy to help. :)

Awesome, thank you!

One point of clarification - if using Zoints, and the "use archive as sitemap" - does that mean that the vbSEO Sitemap Generator would be redundant and not needed? I don't have it installed yet, but it was on my list of "possible addons".

thanks.

No. These are different things. The "sitemap" referred to in Zoints SEO is a standard sitemap, basically just a paginated listing of all the pages on a website. This is meant both for humans and spiders.

The sitemap generator add-ons (there are several) create an XML file that conforms to the specificatiuons for Google sitemaps, which has since been adopted also by Yahoo and MSN Search. This is intended so9lely to provide specifically formatted information to search engines.

You can use both and probably should, especially with a relatively new forum.