I'd hate to throw a wet blanket on this party. But considering that up till now the sitemaps have been of no use with all the bad URLs if ShowPost was included, should this be in beta till we get all the bugs worked out?

Alot of people are putting their seo eggs in this basket and so far ALOT of us have all sent bad site maps to google. I'm not happy about that to be honest.

And what about the yahoo! URLs? My research says use URL encoding. Other research says no encoding. What is the authority on this change?

This is not an add on where you say oh so what, the user just sees a non bold text where there should be bold, we'll fix it soon. These are things that should have been 100% from the get go!

Thank god the code aint encoded, because the few bugs I have fixed in advance myself would never have been addressable.

Are we at production level here now or what? I don't like the idea that an SEO expert is playing with my sitemaps to learn!

hi

when ever google try to access my data folder because my sitemap is there its gives error 500 . Thats becuase i put password to that folder so how google will downlaod the sitemap ? is there away to let the sitemap upload to just forum folder so its will be easy for google to downlaod it ?!

Quick question: Should it be submitting for http://www.nzboards.com/ or http://www.nzboards.com/forums ?

Does it make a difference?

(Oh, and... @noppid: "alot" means 'to proportion out', you are looking for two words: "A" and "lot".)

dagger77,

the vbseo_sitemap/data/ folder should NOT be accessed directly. All sitemap files are downloaded using forumsroot/ path (it works using mod_rewrite rules in .htaccess). That was discussed several times in this thread :) , for instance
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=394

kall,

In case when sitemap contains only forums URLs, it's fine to keep it in forums/ subfolder.

But if you will include non-vB URLs linking to the root (using "extra-urls.txt" or addons), then sitemap files should reside in the root.

I'm not looking for a pissing match here, so don't stir the pot.

If you are so good with your eyes, next time look for some of the bugs to be fixed before having a bunch of us submit broken sitemap files.

I have chipped in and helped with this hacks bugs and I'm glad I did. But don't give me a broken toy and tell me an expert made it when as a meer amature I have to find and fix bugs. When you call yourself and "expert" you have to wear the lable and perform like one.

I'm asking a legitimate question. Is this expert coded work done or not? I say not and I'd like to see it fixed in a more timely manner in the future. This is a very serious part of a websites existance one is playing with here. It's not to be taken lightly. Worse it raises the question of the quality of the closed code in other products.

I'm trying to look out for the vBSEO coders here, not insult them. But I WILL call them to the mat on quality and timelyness since they are experts and should know the drill.

@noppid:

Unfortunately, we completed a fix but it was not uploaded to the site in a timely fashion. The bug in the showpost URLs has been corrected. FYI This issue results in having a small number of showpost links repeated multiple times, which is not a big problem and is similar to having "showpost" pages disabled.

Note: The code is now updated here with the bug fix.

We are at production level. However, bugs are a fact of life in the software development lifecycle. As in the past, we will continue to do our best to provide fast upgrades whenever an issue (large or small) is identified.

Thank-you for being the first to alert us to this issue.

As for Yahoo sitemaps, we have not found any documentation indicating that the URLs need to be URL encoded. However, Yahoo just updated its sitemap format. They accept either RSS or single URL submissions. So, we are now working on upgrading the plugin.

403 Forbidden Error when I submit to Yahoo.

Is there anyway to confirm that google has downloaded the sitemap? Alittle confused now that it is all setup

Thanks
Ryan

yeah mee to, i am also confused

I totally disagree with your assessment of the number of URLs affected. It was not a few, it was ALL vB showpost URLs. But it's fixed, water under the bridge.

You're doing good. But you have a bigger responsibility here then the average hacker. It's great to see the code up to date. Asking this to happen faster and more accuartly may seem like being a pain in the A**, but it's necessary that we be dilligent when we hack what will affect folks in the SERPs.

Thanks for the reply and a great hack. I'm glad to see you taking this critisism professionally.

Regards

Ryan,
Please make sure that you have the correct mod_rewrite rule entered in .htaccess (it was slightly changed in one of previous versions).

You will see every sitemap download request in your vbseo_sitemap/ interface (both Google and Yahoo downloads).