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:

[WritersBeat]

If you have mod_rewrite for a while, and decide you don't want to use it - how detrimental would it be? Because I've had it for many months now - but I'm thinking about removing it.

[nocte]

Originally Posted by WritersBeat

If you have mod_rewrite for a while, and decide you don't want to use it - how detrimental would it be? Because I've had it for many months now - but I'm thinking about removing it.

well, you can unintall Zoins SEO but you should keep a .htaccess file that redirects all rewritten URLS (wich may be listed in Search engines and linked in your users postings as well) to the normal URLs.

Doing this you won't have any negative consequences (except from the SEO aspect..)

[WritersBeat]

Honestly, is there any benefit of Zoints SEO right now? Besides debatable opinions on rewriting the urls?

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by WritersBeat

Honestly, is there any benefit of Zoints SEO right now? Besides debatable opinions on rewriting the urls?

Yes, definitely.

I don't use (or recommend) mod_rewrite but I have Zoints SEo installed for several other features, including funneling the home page URL, customized description tags, and several others.

[masons]

I use zoints SEO and I think recently my Google results are jumping up very quickly.. within a month went from 0/10 to 3/10 on PR

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by masons

I use zoints SEO and I think recently my Google results are jumping up very quickly.. within a month went from 0/10 to 3/10 on PR

Zoints SEO is beneficial in a lot of ways but it does NOT affect PageRank.

PageRank is strictly a measure of the number and quality of incoming links to the page.

[bhanuprasad1981]

Originally Posted by nocte

well, you can unintall Zoins SEO but you should keep a .htaccess file that redirects all rewritten URLS (wich may be listed in Search engines and linked in your users postings as well) to the normal URLs.

Doing this you won't have any negative consequences (except from the SEO aspect..)

can u please tell me exactly what has to be done with .htacess file, b cos when i remove seo hack whole my forum goes down and no page can be accessed until i re install it

[djbaxter]

There's a reason the add-on comes with this warning:

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

This is especially true for using mod_rewrite.

I suggest you go to http://network.zoints.com/

[newforum]

If i install this will there be any errors occuring. Please anyone tell me your experience on this. I have a vb of V3.6.5

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by newforum

If i install this will there be any errors occuring. Please anyone tell me your experience on this. I have a vb of V3.6.5

If you follow all the instructions correctly, it shouldn't be a problem - it's working fine for me for vBulletin version 3.65.

1. There is a known conflict with vBGooglemaps - there is a fix for that however.

2. I recommend that you do NOT enable "seo friendly URLs" aka mod_rewrite. You really don't need it with vBulletin, it really won't help, and the majority of issues people have with this add-on are because of the use of mod_rewrite.