Google sitemap for the vB Archives. Redirect human and robots.

Release V1.2 (9 Nov 2005)
* Higher sitemap priority rate is given to threads with new posts. So Google can index fresh threads first.

* Not recommending the original optional STEP 3 hack. To avoid potential Google penalty, my advice is to remove the STEP 3 hack.

Release V1.1a (12 Oct 2005)

* Bug fix only

Release V1.1 (9 Oct 2005)

* Can handle very large forums with more than 50,000 URLs per forum
URLs will be spanned through multiple files for each large forum.

* Created a function to detect search engine crawlers. The vB built-in
search engine detector can only identify about 3 or 4 search engines.
My function will detect over 20 search engine crawlers.

* Support forums hosted by web servers that do not support 'fix_pathinfo'
ie. instead of the usual 'archive/index.php/f-10.html' link. These
forums have a link as 'archive/index.php?f-10.html'.

* Alert about wrong directory permissions to help newbies.

* Automatically write index file to archive directory if the php
script can not write into the base vB directory.

* Bug fixes.


Objectives
==============

• Create Google sitemap files and sitemap index file for vB archives, submit to Google by the Scheduled Tasks.
• To have the vB Archive used as a mirror to the actual threads.
• Google loves the nature of the archive pages, as they are static and do not contain repeated contents.
• Google gauge pages heavily based on external links. We need to redirect these external thread links to the archive pages.
• We often see vbulletin archive in the Google search results, but the users are taken to the archive page instead of the actual threads. We need to automatically redirect visitors to the actual threads instead of the archive. Otherwise the visitor either need to reclick for the Full Version or read the dull archive contents.

Q and A
==============
Q. Would the sitemap contain the links for hidden forums?
A. No, the forum permission was consulted while generating the sitemap files.

Q. How often are the sitemap files generated?
A. You decide and set in the Scheduled Tasks. The script can not be called by external user by default to prevent boring people killing your server.

Q. Is the sitemap file compressed.
A. Yes, the multiple sitemap files are gunziped according to Google sitemap standard to save bandwidth. Sitemap index file is not compressed, it is submitted as a normal xml file.

Q. Would the sitemaps include links for the normal threads? eg. showthread.php?t=1234...
A. No, it is unlikely Google will index your entire site if you feed it with all the combination of showthread links. It is better to let Google going through the more static archives. You will have a better chance for sure to have more thread contents indexed by Google this way.

Q. Why don't you go crazy about rewrite rules and do things like including thread title as the url.
A. I won't deny having keywords in the url is a good SEO strategy, but Google also does not like "Over Search Engine Optimized" web sites. Google has recently penalized a huge number of such sites. Sending them from page rank of 5, 6 to 0.

Q. Does sitemap really help?
A. Definitely, Google has done over 60,000 pages since I submitted my sitemaps a few days ago. Yahoo bots were visiting more pages than Google before the sitemap. I expect the total Google visits for this month will be exceeding Yahoo in the next one or two days.

What is involved?
==================
I have divided this hack into two steps. The first step involves unloading a php file. This enables the sitemap to be generated and submitted to Google.

The second step involves installing a Plugin using AdminCP. This sends all robots to the archive pages, preventing them viewing the actual threads.

For example, Google/Other Crawlers follows an external link to visit:
http://forums.mysite/showthread.php?t=1234&page=2

It will be told this page is permanently relocated to:
http://forums.mysite/archive/index.php/t-1234-p-2

This way you don't lose page rank gain from external links.

Install
=========
To install, follow the readme file.
To let me know you have installed this and let me send update information to you. Please click INSTALL .

Strategy
=========

It is unlikely Google/other Search Engine will index your entire site, especially due to the dynamic nature of the vbulletin forums. An archive sitemap will let Google concentrate on the real contents of your forums -- the threads. If Google needs to go through the endless member profile pages. It will get sick of it and just become tired.(sorry, perhaps robots can not become tired). What we can do is disallowing the crawling of unneccessary pages. My robots.txt contains:

#ALL BOTS
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admincp/
Disallow: /ajax.php
Disallow: /attachments/
Disallow: /clientscript/
Disallow: /cpstyles/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /install/
Disallow: /modcp/
Disallow: /subscriptions/
Disallow: /customavatars/
Disallow: /customprofilepics/
Disallow: /announcement.php
Disallow: /attachment.php
Disallow: /calendar.php
Disallow: /cron.php
Disallow: /editpost.php
Disallow: /external.php
Disallow: /faq.php
Disallow: /frm_attach
Disallow: /image.php
#Disallow: /index.php
Disallow: /inlinemod.php
Disallow: /joinrequests.php
Disallow: /login.php
Disallow: /member.php?
Disallow: /memberlist.php
Disallow: /misc.php
Disallow: /moderator.php
Disallow: /newattachment.php
Disallow: /newreply.php
Disallow: /newthread.php
Disallow: /online.php
Disallow: /payment_gateway.php
Disallow: /payments.php
Disallow: /poll.php
Disallow: /postings.php
Disallow: /printthread.php
Disallow: /private.php
Disallow: /profile.php
Disallow: /register.php
Disallow: /report.php
Disallow: /reputation.php
Disallow: /search.php
Disallow: /sendmessage.php
Disallow: /showgroups.php
Disallow: /showpost.php
Disallow: /subscription.php
Disallow: /usercp.php
Disallow: /threadrate.php
Disallow: /usercp.php
Disallow: /usernote.php

You perhaps have noticed I included index.php in there. Apparently Google regards http://forums.mysite/index.html as same as http://forums.mysite/
...but http://forums.mysite/index.php as a different file. The default vB templates include index.php as the internal link. That will spread your page rank on your home page! So it is better off not letting Google see this file.

If you have rewrite installed. Perhaps you could add to the .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$
RewriteRule ^index.php$ / [R=301,L]

(if your forums are under http://site/forums/. Try: RewriteRule ^forums/index.php$ forums/ [R=301,L])

That will redirect /index.php to /, but only if no query_string is presented. ie. /index.php?do=mymod will not be redirected.

[lierduh]

Originally Posted by jdingman

Looks great so far. One question about mod_rewrite

using that redirects if you're using forums.domain.com. What about if you're using domain.com/forums/? What mod_rewrite would you use for that redirect?

(not exactly for me because I can probably get it working, but anyone else that might need this as well.)

Without testing, I think
RewriteRule ^forums/index.php$ forums/ [R=301,L]

Should do.

[falter]

Originally Posted by lierduh

I have a new version ready to be released. If anyone wants, you can download this and try out before I put together the package.

I still need to do the documentation for the modifications of index.php and global.php files.

I don't know if this is due to any mods I have (which I'm pretty light on), but when I run your script directly (not using cron), I get the following output:

Warning: array_keys(): The first argument should be an array in /path/to/my/stuff/forums/includes/class_core.php on line 1453

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /path/to/my/stuff/forums/includes/class_core.php on line 1453

Warning: array_keys(): The first argument should be an array in /path/to/my/stuff/forums/includes/class_core.php on line 1472

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /path/to/my/stuff/forums/includes/class_core.php on line 1472

Unable to add cookies, header already sent.
File: /path/to/my/stuff/forums/archive/forums_sitemap.php
Line: 1

Removing the "unset($_COOKIE);" from line 56 helps get the script to run, but, since my cookies are still there, all my private forums get sitemapped, too. so, I just moved down the stuff in the block above, and everything works.

So, I go from this:

PHP Code:

if (function_exists('log_cron_action'))
{
    global $index_zp;
    global $debug_log;
    global $max_url;
    unset($vbulletin->userinfo);
    $vbulletin->userinfo['userid'] = 0;
}
else
{
    if ($run_by_vb_Scheduled_Task_only)
    {
        exit("Script can only be run by vB Scheduled Tasks. Set \$run_by_vb_Scheduled_Task_only to 0 if you need to run manually");
    }

    unset($_COOKIE);
    $specialtemplates = array();
    require_once(CWD . '/includes/init.php');
} 


to this

PHP Code:

if (function_exists('log_cron_action'))
{
    global $index_zp;
    global $debug_log;
    global $max_url;
    unset($vbulletin->userinfo);
    $vbulletin->userinfo['userid'] = 0;
}
else
{
    if ($run_by_vb_Scheduled_Task_only)
    {
        exit("Script can only be run by vB Scheduled Tasks. Set \$run_by_vb_Scheduled_Task_only to 0 if you need to run manually");
    }

    $specialtemplates = array();
    require_once(CWD . '/includes/init.php');
    unset($vbulletin->userinfo);
    $vbulletin->userinfo['userid'] = 0;
} 


[lierduh]

I remember now, someone else reported this as well. I think it might be php5 related. I don't have php5 to test, so I think I won't unset cookies then.

Thanks.

Originally Posted by falter

I don't know if this is due to any mods I have (which I'm pretty light on), but when I run your script directly (not using cron), I get the following output:



Removing the "unset($_COOKIE);" from line 56 helps get the script to run, but, since my cookies are still there, all my private forums get sitemapped, too. so, I just moved down the stuff in the block above, and everything works.

[dutchbb]

Originally Posted by falter

your robots.txt should be accessible at the root of your domain (http://www.mydomain.com/robots.txt). this is the only place that spiders know to check.

if you're trying to explicitly define specific files (ex. /forums/showthread.php), then you should define that entry in your robots.txt file. there's no point in not putting the ".php" at the end (ex. /forums/showthread), it doesn't buy you anything. it can actually have a negative impact if your entries aren't defined well. say you're trying to tell search engines to ignore "/forum/s.php" (this is just hypothetical). if you were to just put "/forum/s" in your robots.txt, then, in addition to blocking "/forum/s.php", you'd be blocking "/forum/showthread.php", "/forum/search.php", "/forum/showgroups.php", anything else where the url starts with "/forum/s" .... as you can see, it's important to be as specific as possible, otherwise you risk shutting spiders out of huge chunks of your site.

Thank you. I read it on this site, the guy seems to be some sort of guru about vbulletin SEO: http://forum.time2dine.co.nz/seo-vbu...lletin-98.html

I have a few questions (also for the author of this thread: )

What does http://www.vbseo.com have that this hack doesn't provide. Is this worth buying, or is it basically the same?

What do you think about the tips/hack provided on this site: http://forum.time2dine.co.nz/seo-vbu...lletin-98.html he has nr1 ranking on google for "vbulletin SEO" keywords.

[lierduh]

Basically my hack only lets Google index the real contents of the forums using vB archives. I do not think it is neccessary to let Google index both the full version threads and the archives. For more details and reasons, please read my open post.

[Unreal Player]

Ok, My site has been pending for almost 2 days. They say "several hours" wtf? anyone else get this?

[jdingman]

Is it crucial that I change permission for the root or my forum directory? I haven't changed them and it's been working fine. I did change my /archive/ to 755, but not ./

does it make that much of a difference?

[trilljester]

Originally Posted by jdingman

Is it crucial that I change permission for the root or my forum directory? I haven't changed them and it's been working fine. I did change my /archive/ to 755, but not ./

does it make that much of a difference?

Well, as long as the web server "user" process has access to write to the root forum directory and archive/ then 755 is fine, assuming that the user owns the directories. The 55 part will keep others from writing to those directories.

[xtreme-mobile]

ummm all is goinbg well but what the helldo i have to do for step 3 it doesnt make any sense to me

any help would be fantastic

[falter]

hey lierduh,

I've been playing around a bit with the robot detection. I snagged a bunch of code from "online.php", hacked it up a bit, and came up with this (as a drop-in replacement for the "is_robot_visit" function. This one uses the spiders_vbulletin.xml file, which I recommend people updating. The 3.5.0 gold version is fairly vanilla. I got an updated one from here: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showp...5&postcount=12

Anyway, here's the change to global.php (this is assuming that you have the very latest version of lierduh's code )

PHP Code:

 /**
    * Return true if visited by a robot.
    */
    function is_robot_visit()
    {
        require_once(DIR . '/includes/class_xml.php');
        $xmlobj = new XMLparser(false, DIR . '/includes/xml/spiders_vbulletin.xml');
        $spiderdata = $xmlobj->parse();
    
        if (is_array($spiderdata['spider']))
        {
            foreach ($spiderdata['spider'] AS $spiderling)
            {
                if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) AND preg_match("#". preg_quote($spiderling['ident'], '#') . "#si", $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
                    return true;
                }
            }
        }
        unset($spiderdata, $xmlobj);
        return false;
    } 


There's all sorts of extra markup in the xml for ip ranges and such, but I'm just goign to match against the user-agents, for now.