Major Additions - Zoints SEO

********Please do not use this modification unless you are VERY well educated on SEO and forum modification********

Zoints is a company that believes that forums are the killer application of the internet. We want to empower forum owners to take their community to the next level. Therefore, Zoints has been developing an extremely powerful vBulletin forum SEO and revenue enhancing solution for more than two years now. However, because we are focusing on our Forum Network and Thread Tagging System, we have decided to release this SEO solution to the vBulletin community under the lgpl license. Zoints SEO is now open source and NOT supported by us. We hope that the vBulletin dev community comes together to take this already powerful solution and make it even better. Empower yourselves

Zoints SEO can be discussed here or http://network.zoints.com (again, we will not be providing official support).


Known bugs

1. If a user disables cookies, infinite redirect loop.
2. index2, index3 pagination breaks some things. Standard p2, p3 works fine.


Zoints SEO is currently incompatible with: POSSIBLE FIX. PLEASE TRY THIS AND REPORT BACK. THANK YOU!
1. Incompatibility with vBA Gallery link.
2. Incompatibility with vBA Links
3. Improper linking from vBA CMPS Recent threads
4. Google Maps
[s]5. Non english characters[/s] - Character replacement is now available.


Without further ado:

[djbaxter]

1. That same information would probably be distilled from the content of the post/thread and a decent optimized page title without the need for mod_rewrite.

2. The majority of forum thread titles are so vague or generic or badly misspelled that the keyword-URL derived from them are virtually useless anyway.

Sample of recent threads on one large vBulletin forum:

Updated criterion
When members think they own the forum
Greetings from New England
Pricing Forums To Buy
What do you dislike the most?
Need a WordPress blog designer...
Best Free Software?
Editing members posts
Man's best friend indeed
Alert: Registerfly.com
Starting a forum help
How Many Members?
Question about cash mod and referral plus mod...
Board closed for upgrades - bad for SEO?
Movie/Game/TV Buffs required for New Site
1and1.co.uk?
Any major differences between Vbulletin?
Introducing {site name}
Should I Sell My Forum --

And another large webmaster forum:

No Link between Iraq and Al Qaeda
Webmaster's Blog
Sponser the SECOND nicest wordpress THEME ever SEEN
Google de ranked my directory
My grandma has just died
Warrior-type mascot
site wide exchange or link page exchange
CSS Site shows correct in Firefox but wrong in IE
Pr 3 directory - Free submission
Why
Owned Vbulletin License 4 Sale
Selling Links Cheap
Permanent PR6 links
PR4 Link exchange
[FREE] Need Made for Adsense (MFA) Script?
Any potential?
xbox forum 4 sell
The $48 Adsense website
More Forum Sign-Ups
Sponsor a cute Wordpress theme
Reviews my blog please
What do you think about Muslims and Jihad and Crusades

These are taken from "Today's Posts" on two vBulletin forums, edited only to remove thread titles that might identify the forum.

How many of those are going to convert to useful keyword URLs? Yes, a few perhaps... How many of those would be indexed for those same keywords from the content alone? How many others would yield better keywords from the content alone?

[phlogiston]

I understand that the SEO benefits of rewriting forum thread urls is very debatable - I was pointing out an unrelated benefit for real human people rather.

Very often Joe Public won't take your links and give them good context, they'll be copy-pasted asis. For people reading those links pasted to other sites or in a blog, before clicking on it, a showthread link gives me no idea where I'll end up other than the domain and "it's a forum".

A rewritten url offers extra human readable clues BEFORE BEING CLICKED through to the page to discover the pagetitle or content.
It also reassures the copy-paster that they've pasted the correct link.


I was merely pointing out that SEO isn't the be all and end all reasoning behind rewriting obscure thread id number urls, people-friendly urls are as important to me as search-engine-friendly

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by phlogiston

I understand that the SEO benefits of rewriting forum thread urls is very debatable - I was pointing out an unrelated benefit for real human people rather.

Very often Joe Public won't take your links and give them good context, they'll be copy-pasted asis. For people reading those links pasted to other sites or in a blog, before clicking on it, a showthread link gives me no idea where I'll end up other than the domain and "it's a forum".

A rewritten url offers extra human readable clues BEFORE BEING CLICKED through to the page to discover the pagetitle or content.

...which I don't think will make the slightest difference to human visitors. They are going to click on links from a search engine and what will determine those links is a combination of how far down the list the link is and the snippet.

Nobody will remember anything except the domain and tld (forum.com) anyway.

mod_rewrite has its uses, primarily if the software you're usiing creates search-engine-UNfriendly URLs - vBulletin does not do that out-of-the-box so the impact of mod_rewrite is extra server load and little else - except for creating additional things that can go wrong, which is likely the case with the poster where I raised the issue in the first place.

[Capt. GannA]

Originally Posted by djbaxter

My advice is to turn off URL rewriting.

Not quite the answer I was looking for.. but thanks.

Anyone else? Please?

[phlogiston]

Originally Posted by djbaxter

...which I don't think will make the slightest difference to human visitors. They are going to click on links from a search engine and what will determine those links is a combination of how far down the list the link is and the snippet.

your still thinking "search engines" when my poor writing was trying to avoid that.
Lots of important links to your site will (hopefully!) be posted in blogs, other forums, on folks' myspaces, sent via email, etc. In those cases a human-friendly url can be to your benefit in my opinion. Whether that or other considerations outweigh the server load impact will depend on a site by site basis.

This is slightly off-topic of specifically Zoints SEO though, oops :$

Originally Posted by Capt. GannA

Anyone else? Please?

merging has always worked fine with me using Zoints SEO - although to narrow it down you could try switching off the url rewriting temporarily and try merging, find out if that is what's causingthe trouble or if it's something else

[bhanuprasad1981]

i just want to know wether can we revert all urls to normal php form without any problem caused to forum normal work?
i am using zoints seo from last 3 months it works nice ,but the problem is that all the post including some post made by admins in private forums are also starting to be visible in google , all my member profiles are also visible in google too,
thats so annoying to me
can i revert /remove zoints and bring forum back to normal?
please reply me

[mikey1090]

i think there should be an on/off switch in your vbulletin options

[bhanuprasad1981]

Originally Posted by mikey1090

i think there should be an on/off switch in your vbulletin options

yes but it stops future urls not past ( i think)

[kartik786]

Getting the error

No input file specified.

Ne idea what to be done ?

[moondragon13]

I've installed the mod and everything works awesome, thanks!

I am trying to get the mod_rewrite to work but it will not. I keep getting a 404 Not Found when I try to use the mod_rewrite rule. Any ideas? I am sure mod_rewrite is on in the apache config because my Word Press uses it with no problems, I also have my own rewrite rule on another site.

Apache 1.3.x