Don't confuse this product with vBSEO. This is vBSEO Sitemap (a separate and free mod) it has officially been unsupported for a long time.

About the only place you are going to get support on it now is right here from fellow vB users. If you have a question or issue just ask. There are more people familiar with the product here than almost anywhere else.

I've only just noticed that this mod doesn't work for me. According to the logs, there is no bot activity on my site (even know I see them on "Who's Online"); how do I fix this?

Are you supposed to manually submit vbseo_sitemap/data/sitemap_forum_1.xml.gz etc to Webmasters?

Also, which ones should you submit?

Yes, you need to submit the index file ONLY to search engines (namely Google & Bing). Submitting the other files won't hurt but there will also be no benefit. The other files are linked through the index file and will be automatically scanned as long as the index file is submitted to the search engines.


Submittion url should look like:

Once submitted the first time, search engines will know where it is and continually look for it and search for changes/updates. You can also set up VBSEO Sitemap to automatically notify search engines each time it is updated (it is a setting). This may get your site updates indexed a few hours quicker depending on how often your site is already being scanned by the search engines. The auto-notify currently only works for Google & Bing. They are the two largest search engines anyway and where probably 90+% of your search engine traffic is coming from, so it is a handy feature.

I'm getting errors with this.

sitemap_index.xml.gz is located in /vbseo_sitemap/data/..., but when I link to it the search engines can't find the additional xml's because they're reportedly supposed to be in the root folder.

How do I fix this aside from manually adding each one? Thanks for your help by the way. :)

You are correct the actual file locations for all sitemaps are in /vbseo_sitemap/data/ but that is not where you link to them. You link to the index file in the forum root.


The index sitemap file does not reside there but it and all other sitemap files are accessed there. For this to work correctly, this line should be in your forum root .htaccess .

Where is the information to run on 4.21? I uninstalled the plugin as it ceased to work and I understand that should run if I make some changes.

Hello,

That rewrite rule was already present in HT access, but Google is still throwing up errors when I try to submit "sitemap_index.xml.gz" as a sitemap.

Any ideas/suggestions?

Message me your site address and I'll see if I can't track down the issue.

I have had this installed for a few months now and it's working great. The only thing
I don't receive is the SE Bots Activity Log, it's just blank.. Any ideas?

(I have the robots.txt added along with the meta tag for it)

I get plenty of spider bots on the site, just nothing in the log. Any suggestions or help
will be greatly appreciated

There is something strange in here showed up after my web hosting "Bluehost" had been down for almost 1 day. I get this error:
as if my web hosting doesn't support Zend optimizer, but I could see the feature is ON.

I use PHP 5.4 (FastCGI) and I'm wondering if everyone is the same or different on this!!

any idea ??

Update: I had to copy some zend opimizer url path from php5.2 fast-cgi to php5.4 fast-cgi and it works perfect!!

This is not working anymore.
Can this be fixed?

I have the issue with the malformed cms pages in the cms sitemap file. The trailing slash after the root url is missing.

I have just downloaded the install and this is installed today. But the problem seems to be back from a previous version.

Does anyone have the two files bolded below from the fixed version they could give me?

Muy bueno. Lo utilizaré a ver qué tal

Please keep posts in English.

I have this error after Run Generator :

[SECTION START] tags [25,482.5Kb mem used] [61,254,440s (+61,254,440s)]

I have installed this mod today after then i try to submit it on manually on google web master but it saying /sitemap_index.xml.gz not found on server . but it was already in data folder then i try to submit sitemap with full extension but still same issue i face after then i download manually sitemap_index.xml.gz on my pc and then upload it on root then it working and then i have submit it into google webmaster. i dont know whats happening please guide me whats right or wrong?

I too got this message. Then I had removed those files from root Dir. Please any reply is appreciated.

The rules setup for VBSEO folders will deny direct access to the files (intentionally for security reasons).


I would assume your issues are with your .htaccess file(s) not being setup correctly.


Try this link: http://www.vbseo.com/f67/vbseo-htaccess-file-47787/
or Google VBSEO .htaccess rules.

Plus if you have a reference to your sitemap in robots.txt, you may want to check that is for the proper filename as this mod has a unique one for sitemap index, even if you dont use vbseo like me.

(and note, this mod works best if you let the sitemap reside in its natural directory. And also note, go ahead and disable the post setting in this mod as all it does is create 404 errors for google)

Thanks both of u i have add this

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^((urllist|sitemap).*\.(xml|txt)(\.gz)?)$ vbseo_sitemap/vbseo_getsitemap.php?sitemap=$1 [L]

now its working and i have submit sitemap on google webmaster.

hey i need to submit it also on bing and i need to submit it again on google webmaster or it will work automatically ?

It you have it setup to run automatically both Google and Bing will be notified that there is a new sitemap. You will see all their activity in the "Sitemap Downloads Log". This is an easy way to confirm they are receiving the update notifications. After a short time even if you don't send update notifications they will still check for changes in your sitemap automatically. You will typically see download activity from both Google (Googlebot) and Bing (msnbot) once a day.


If you run the sitemap creation manually, there will be no notifications sent to Google or Bing and this is when you'll need to make sure to submit/resubmit your sitemaps.

Thanks for it dear. would u like to tell me why is not active on yahoo?

Is there i need to edit robots.txt after install this mod?

It's always good practise to reference your sitemap in robots.txt.


I personally do it on the first line. In my case the first line looks like this:

Two weeks ago, I've uninstalled VBSEO. After this, I started using vBulletin's own SEO system.

Now, everytime I check Google Webmaster Tools, it says "this file does not contain any urls."

Do you get the same error and if it is so, how did you solve it?

Did you change the robots.txt sitemap reference to the new sitemap url?

Where does one find the robots.txt?

Google webmaster showing me this following error i dont know what should i do now

We were unable to read your Sitemap. It may contain an entry we are unable to recognize. Please validate your Sitemap before resubmitting

In your root directory. You may want to seach around for a good example robots.txt to use with vB to give you a head start on getting it right.

If you have just submitted your new sitemap url to google, give it a week or so to settle the data. It seems that happened to me until everything got settled with my sitemaps and with google reading it properly.

edit to add, remember that the vbseo sitemap resides in the vbseo_sitemap directory. That will need to be in robots.txt as well as submitted to google.

edit the edit, I just reaslized I am not sure about the url structure, but just as long as it is properly entered it will work.

Yes, i am guessing that you are right but from somebody that has very little idea, searching round for a good example doesn't really mean much..

Is it possible to provide a good example?

And also a bad example?

Thanks..............

Edit: I cannot find a robots.txt in my root directory, it isn't there..

I also do not have vbseo as a mod. If it is part of the vB 4.2.1 core, I wouldn't know that either...

If robots.txt isn't there create a new one. Good example can be found here:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=302570




vbSEO is not part of vB 4.2.1

Yes, I have been using vb for some time, and forgot robots.txt doesnt come with the bundle.

And yes, its no big deal to make one and uploasd to your root.
It is just a flat txt file anyway.

That is a good example.

And just append the sitemap url and reference to the header or footer.

I have submit it before 15 or 20 day ago, it was working fine but from last 7 days its showing said error

I for what ever reason decided to go to my manage domains page and just decided to click away to see how google was doing with crawling my site and such..

Well I noticed that for some reason google was saying that there is an error and was not able to crawl my site and forums as well as not being able to access the sitemap...

I believe its something to do with google themselves, I wouldn't worry to much about it, wait a few days maybe a couple of weeks and then see if they are still having problems with the sitemaps....

Please not, that was the issue with me it could of course be something completely different with you.

One more thing, make sure you add this to your robots.txt


User-agent: *
Allow: /
sitemap:http://www.yourdomain.com/path/to/your/sitemap-file


This instructs them to allow access to your sitemap at the path indicated here...

i have done this but still same problem in google webmaster

Quote:

Originally Posted by friendlymela (Post 2450384) i have done this but still same problem in google webmaster

There are some characters that Google does not like to see in sitemaps and will error out when trying to read them. vBSEO Sitemap should encode all urls correctly so this isn't an issue but I've have run across at least a couple characters that aren't coded correctly. Offhand I can't remember exactly the ones I've personally run into but I believe the ampersand was one of them ("&" should be changed to "&" in any url reference). I remember the ampersand was definitely an issue for me if it wasn't coded as "&" I ran across this error a couple times when I was adding urls to the "extra-urls.txt" file.

Whenever Google would give me a sitemap error, my solution was to check my latest sitemap manually and see if there was an odd character in any thread/post title url. Usually I would find one, then I would just go to the forum edit the thread title, recreate the sitemap and all was good.

Also, do not use all the settings in vbseo sitemap.

Indexing the "post" settings as on, may produce considerable 404 errors in webmaster tools. That settings will list incorrect url's in sitemaps. (I am using pretty urls)