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.

[newmomsforum]

Hmm. strange.

Everything appears to have worked well. the first manual run went well.

CMOD Archive directory and forum root to 777

Lots of nice sitemap_1.gz - sitemap_22.gz files in my Archive But no g_sitemap.xml in my forum root.

Any ideas?

Thanks All

Claire

[newmomsforum]

Originally Posted by geezmo

any reply to my question above anyone?

anyway, i have another question. what i just did was manually submit to Google the sitemaps generated by this hack. as i said before, in /forum/archive folder, i have a lot of gz files which i assume are sitemaps.

my question is, how are the different gz files different from one another? i have more than 50 sitemap files from number 13 until number 98 but i am missing other files. what i mean is i have sitemap_13.gz file and sitemap_98.gz but i don't have sitemap_21.gz , sitemap_22.gz and sitemap_23.gz files to name a few.

i only submitted sitemap_98.gz and i'm wondering if the other (or all?) sitemap files need to be submitted to Google?

As I understand it a sitemap is created for each forum?

[stinger2]

any one tried this on 3.5.4?

[stinger2]

bump

[filmking]

Thanks fior this great hack. My only problem in install was setting permission for base directory. I don't use a "forums" directory.. all base files are in public_html root.... so for whatever reason just CHmod 777 on the root didn't allow the base sitemap index file to get created. THe program continued to put the index file in archieves with the others. Finally over came this problem by placing a blank "sitemap.xml" file in the base directory and then chmod it to 777. Ran the program and it got replaced by the program with a new one and no longer received the error message of base premissions not correct. Getting an immediate increase in Google listings.. thank you

[RichieBoy67]

Can you please post what the step 3 was so I can remove it???

[ShackMaster]

Is this hack no longer supported?

I've tried uploading /forums/archive/forums_sitemap.php to Google and it will not let me add it. I noticed in an ealier thread that /forums/g_sitemap.xml should be what is submitted... but I do not have this file anywhere that I can find.

I did check out my server weblog and these are a few lines:

"GET /forums/archive/index.php/t-106-p-1.html HTTP/1.1" 200 10440 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

"GET /forums/showthread.php?goto=lastpost&t=128 HTTP/1.1" 301 5 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

"GET /forums/showthread.php?p=520 HTTP/1.1" 301 5 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

"GET /forums/archive/index.php/t-10.html HTTP/1.1" 200 11155 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

"GET /forums/showthread.php?p=642 HTTP/1.1" 301 5 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

"GET /forums/archive/index.php/t-106-p-1.html HTTP/1.1" 200 10440 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

"GET /forums/showthread.php?goto=lastpost&t=89 HTTP/1.1" 301 5 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

Any help?

[justim123]

Originally Posted by flaregun

now I'm getting this, I change the persmissions in the archive folder, but I still get it.

Warning: gzopen(/public_html/forum/archive/sitemap_3.gz): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /archive/forums_sitemap.php on line 132

Chown data floder to apache user and it gets fixed.

[Viper007Bond]

Is this available for v3.6.x? I'd LOVE this for it!

[maxicep]

rulaz.reserved