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:

[Merrillizer]

I am running this on 3.6.7PL1 with no problems so far.

[Merrillizer]

Spoke too soon....when I click a link in the archive to visit a post, I get a 404. Example...

http://www.marshmarauders.org/forums/archive/t-430.html

Too tired to fool with it now lol.

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by Merrillizer

Spoke too soon....when I click a link in the archive to visit a post, I get a 404. Example...

http://www.marshmarauders.org/forums/archive/t-430.html

Too tired to fool with it now lol.

!. Turn off mod-rewrite. vBulletin doesn't need it.

2. Admin CP | vBulletin Options | Search Engine Friendly Archive - Display Simple View of Threads = NO (By default, threads in the Archive are displayed in a simple manner. Set this to no to have the real threads linked from the archive.)

#2 will also help you with duplicate content issues.

[Merrillizer]

Ok, thanks for the reply. I went in and double-checked zSEO, and I never had url rewrites on, it's always been off.

I went and did #2, then turned zSEO back on, still the same thing. 404 error because the links to threads in the archive are being changed. When I turn zSEO off, they are back to normal again and working. Must be a setting in zSEO that is causing it, but I definitely have url re-writes OFF.

[Fireproof]

djbaxter, I have concluded NOT to use url-rewriting based on your posts and other research. But I'm not hear to debate that.

I was wondering, since I'm new to SEO and there is a disclaimer above that says

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

Would you mind listing out the recommended settings for key settings in Zoints SEO? Would really help out a newbie. If it's too much effort, I understand, but thought I'd ask anyway.

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by Merrillizer

Ok, thanks for the reply. I went in and double-checked zSEO, and I never had url rewrites on, it's always been off.

I went and did #2, then turned zSEO back on, still the same thing. 404 error because the links to threads in the archive are being changed. When I turn zSEO off, they are back to normal again and working. Must be a setting in zSEO that is causing it, but I definitely have url re-writes OFF.

See below.

Originally Posted by Fireproof

djbaxter, I have concluded NOT to use url-rewriting based on your posts and other research. But I'm not hear to debate that.

I was wondering, since I'm new to SEO and there is a disclaimer above that says

Would you mind listing out the recommended settings for key settings in Zoints SEO? Would really help out a newbie. If it's too much effort, I understand, but thought I'd ask anyway.

Here are my settings, although you may want some additional settings - other than mod_rewrite, I don't think you can do a lot of damage with the add-on:

301 Redirect = No

Rewrite URLs = Do not rewrite URLs

Rewrite /archive/ to /sitemap/ = No

Pagination method = Default

Keyword separator = n/a

Number of keywords in the URL = n/a

Block stopwords from being used in the URL? = n/a

Stopwords = n/a

Use custom meta keywords = Yes

Use custom meta descriptions = Yes

You can specify the custom meta descriptions here. = First X words in a thread

First X words in a thread = 60

Fix links to index.php = Yes

Add "All" link to your page navigation? = Yes

Use Dynamic Guest Messages = No

Show Dynamic Guest Message Above Navbar = No

Dynamic Guest Message Title = n/a

Dynamic Guest Message = n/a

Enable Dynamic 'No Permission' Messages = No

Default 'No Permission' Message Title = n/a

Default 'No Permission' Message Message = n/a

Use Archive as Sitemap = Yes

Use Zoints Archive Navigation? = No

Archive Navigation: Pages Per Page = 60

Enable Thread Decay System = No

Decay to a Style = No style decay

Thread Decay Time = n/a

Archive Version = 3.5.4 or newer

[Merrillizer]

Thanks dj! I copied your settings and turned zSEO on and it worked, I tracked the archive post links problem down to the "Use Archive as Sitemap" setting. When set to NO, the URL's to the archive posts are changed. Set back to YES, they are normal and work fine now with zSEO on.

Thanks again!

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by Merrillizer

Thanks dj! I copied your settings and turned zSEO on and it worked, I tracked the archive post links problem down to the "Use Archive as Sitemap" setting. When set to NO, the URL's to the archive posts are changed. Set back to YES, they are normal and work fine now with zSEO on.

Thanks again!

Great! Happy to help.

[Fireproof]

Awesome, thank you!

One point of clarification - if using Zoints, and the "use archive as sitemap" - does that mean that the vbSEO Sitemap Generator would be redundant and not needed? I don't have it installed yet, but it was on my list of "possible addons".

thanks.

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by Fireproof

One point of clarification - if using Zoints, and the "use archive as sitemap" - does that mean that the vbSEO Sitemap Generator would be redundant and not needed? I don't have it installed yet, but it was on my list of "possible addons".

No. These are different things. The "sitemap" referred to in Zoints SEO is a standard sitemap, basically just a paginated listing of all the pages on a website. This is meant both for humans and spiders.

The sitemap generator add-ons (there are several) create an XML file that conforms to the specificatiuons for Google sitemaps, which has since been adopted also by Yahoo and MSN Search. This is intended so9lely to provide specifically formatted information to search engines.

You can use both and probably should, especially with a relatively new forum.