The Arcive of Official vBulletin Modifications Site.

About Developer · **Released**: 08-09-2005

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.

falter · #**112** 10-09-2005, 05:09 PM

update: I went so far as moving the code out of "archive/global.php" into "includes/init.php", where $show['search_engine'] is defined.

I replaced:

PHP Code:


			
$show['search_engine'] = ($vbulletin->superglobal_size['_COOKIE'] == 0 AND preg_match("#(google|msnbot|yahoo! slurp)#si", $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']));

with

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;

    }



$show['search_engine'] = is_robot_visit();

Everything works great!

dutchbb · #**113** 10-09-2005, 05:59 PM

You guys have time for "the redirect to the actual thread for human visitors" instructions in step 3?

Or maybe you can just send the 2 files? The ones in the zip don't make any sence to me

falter · #**114** 10-09-2005, 06:22 PM

if lierduh could provide patchable diff's between the gold (3.5.0) and his modifications, that'd be awesome (I'd do it, but I've hacked up my files way too much, sorry).

lierduh, this page shows how: http://www2.linuxjournal.com/article/1237

it'll make modifying the vanilla files much easier.

xtreme-mobile · #**115** 10-09-2005, 07:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Triple_T

You guys have time for "the redirect to the actual thread for human visitors" instructions in step 3?

Or maybe you can just send the 2 files? The ones in the zip don't make any sence to me

same here i aint got a clue what to do

lierduh · #**116** 10-09-2005, 10:36 PM

Thanks falter. I will merge your code in my next release. With the Stadler's updated xml file. It will be better using the xml file than my string. I should be able to make that into plugins. So that no code needs to be changed regarding search engine crawler detection.

I also have an idea that I should make threads with new posts higher sitemap priority. So a new version is not far away.

It is good to see hackers work together creating better code. It makes it more interesting than explaining how to set permissions.

I have attached patch.diff for the two files.

Quote:

Originally Posted by 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

)

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.

hotrod1 · #**117** 10-10-2005, 12:28 AM

Great hack, thanks alot!

falter · #**118** 10-10-2005, 12:29 AM

lierduh, are you sure that you're diffing a modified 3.5.0 (gold) against the original 3.5.0 (gold) ? I'm having problems running the diffs as patches against the 3.5.0 gold versions of the files (pulled straight out of the tarball).

regardless, perhaps the diffs are the wrong route? Maybe it would do better service to the less technical users if you had some instructions for code modifications that were similar to many of the others hacks? (ex. find [this block of code] add [this chunk of code] right after it, bla bla bla).

Brandon Sheley · #**119** 10-10-2005, 12:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lierduh

I also have an idea that I should make threads with new posts higher sitemap priority. So a new version is not far away.

sounds great, keep up the good work

Unreal Player · #**120** 10-10-2005, 12:50 AM

I do not get your two files at all.

Vtec44 · #**121** 10-10-2005, 01:15 AM

Did you chmod 777 your home folder?

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