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:

[Zoints]

Zoints SEO Explained

Zoints SEO has been in development for a couple of years now. It is an amalgamation of various modifications made to a Big-Board that helped it get to that status. This SEO modification was created with very large boards in mind but should help small forums too.

As you are about to find out, Zoints SEO is very poorly named. If we were going to use a descriptive title, it would be called, "Zoints Search Engine Optimization, Revenue Enhancement, and Lots O' More Members Joining". However, that doesn't quite have the ring that "Zoints SEO" does and our marketing department (which does not actually exist) won out. Prior to installing any SEO modification, you should educate yourself as much as possible regarding SEO. I say this because there are a lot changes you can make that will hurt you. But PLEASE be careful, the statistical probability that the person claiming to know about SEO actually knows a damn thing and isn't just spewing forth garbage they read on a message board is very low. God knows I am not an SEO expert, Zoints is NOT an SEO company, and 98% of the people who claim to be knowledgeable should be run away from very quickly. Two good sites to learn FACTS:

1. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
2. Google Webmaster Guidelines


The Features and Settings of Zoints SEO

After properly installing Zoints SEO, you will be presented with the following options in your admincp:




As with any decent script, Zoints SEO can be turned on or off with a single click. Even better, each time you turn it on, an angel gets their wings.




A 301 redirect is the proper way to redirect a user to a new url. If you change your urls from showthread.php?t=#### to something else and DON'T utilize a 301 redirect, then old links are going to end up going to a 404. That's very bad. Select yes here




Zoints SEO has three primary options for URL rewriting:

1. No URL rewriting
2. URL rewriting without mod_rewrite. Why use this? If you want to insert keywords in the url but don't have mod_rewrite available or don't want to expend the resources (using mod_rewrite is server intensive and slows page generation) then this is a viable solution.
3. The mod_rewrite everyone knows and prefers.





A lot of people like to use the vBulletin archive as a sitemap. If you're going to do that, you might as well name is sitemap, right?




If you choose to utilize keywords in your URL, you have two choices of how to separate the words:

1. keyword-in-url.html
2. keyword_in_url.html




If you choose to utilize keywords in the url, then sometimes thread titles can be way too long. This option truncates the number of keywords in the url to however many you want.




Stopwords are words that the search engines don't care about all that much. You can turn on the removal of stopwords you list with this option.




This is a great picture. Any true SEO will agree that hippos are the cutest animals ever.




If you add stopwords to the box below, they will not be listed in any urls. For example, if you have a thread title of "My dogs likes to walk" and "to" as a stopword, then the url would be /my-dog-likes-walk.html




This option allows you to set meta keywords on a forum by forum basis. Now, I am of the opinion that meta keywords are deprecated. If search engines are still taking them into account in their algorithms, then I weep for the state of internet technologies. Why did we include this? Because someone somewhere would scream and cry and claim they heard from their uncle's friend's grandma's cousin's daughter who built a high ranked geocities page that the reason it was ranked high was the meta keywords.




This is the page that allows you to insert meta keywords on a forum by forum basis. That way if you have a forum about dogs, all the threads can have keywords about dogs. And if you have another forum about cats, all the keywords there can be about hippos because hippos are better than cats anyway.




Zoints SEO also lets you set custom meta descriptions on a forum by forum basis, use the vBulletin default, OR populate the meta description with the first X words of a thread.




If you choose to populate the meta description with the first X words of a thread, this option lets you choose how many.




Should you decide to set the meta descriptions on a forum by forum basis, you will utilize this screen:




Have you ever noticed that vBulletin has domain.com/forums and domain.com/forums/index.php? That's theoretically bad. That's bad because it dilutes your incoming links. Some people will link to domain.com/forums and others will link to domain.com/forums/index.php?. This option gets rid of the index.php so that you just have the clean url.




As stated earlier, Zoints SEO was build with large forums in mind. Have you ever been on a large forum with 20,000 threads in a single subforum and getting to page 73 of 452 was an exercise in futility? Well, the search engines want to get there too so they can efficiently crawl your content. And they also want you to have less than 100 links per page. We therefore came up with this:




What does the "all" option above add?




The "all" link makes life much easier for our friendly search engine bots to get to all of your content in an efficient manner while maintaining less than 100 links per page.




As previously stated, Zoints is much more than just an SEO script. We all know about the very popular "welcome headers" hack that says, "Hi guest, welcome to hippotalk.com, the forum for those who think hippos are very cute. Register or we will poke you with a pointy stick". It's a great hack, but it's not good enough. To increase guest registration rates, you must speak to them. The feature below allows you to write custom guest messages on a forum by forum basis. In other words, if a guest is viewing a subforum on thread in a forum about dogs, you can say, "Hi guest, if you are interested in dogs, then register already!". If another guest is viewing your cat forum threads, they can see something like, "Hi there, why do you like cats? Register and lets talk about it."




The default guest message title:




The default guest message:




You can then set the guest messages on a forum by forum basis on this screen. This lets you target your messages and have more relevant content




This is another trick of the trade. You know all those "no permission" messages people are forever getting? Now you can set them on a forum by forum basis too. This lets you write custom no message pages and direct bots to new areas of your site...




The default no permission messages:




The screen that lets you set no permission messages on a forum by forum basis:




If you want to use the archive as a sitemap, this option does that.




The option below is one of those aimed at large forums. It is 100% impossible for large forums to have less than 100 links on their default archive pages. Zoints figured out a new navigation methodology that allows just that




A simple setting that determines how many archive links per page:




Ok, here we got a little crazy. Try and follow me here. We created a "thread decay" system. Basically, for threads older than X days, guests will be taken to a different version of the page. This different version might have more ads, might have less graphics, etc.




If you choose to decay to a style, this is where you choose which one:




This is the setting for X where any thread older than X decays.




vBulletin changed their archive between 3.5.3 and 3.5.4. The automatic detection fails sometimes so this is where you can switch.




Have you ever tried to place ads in your archive? If so, you know that unless you're a good programmer, it is a pain in the butt. Well, Zoints decided to make it simple with these settings:






And that is Zoints SEO in a nutshell.



Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Is Zoints SEO better than vBSEO?

A. The folks over at vBSEO are pretty darn smart people who have developed what has turned into an excellent product. If you're looking for a quality SUPPORTED solution, you should look over there. Zoints SEO does some things better than vBSEO and vBSEO does many things better than Zoints SEO. Each product has its advantages. It really depends what you're looking for in a product.


Q. You were kidding about not supporting Zoints SEO, right?

A. No.


Q. Are there any bugs in Zoints SEO?

A. Zoints SEO has been tested on dozens of forums (including many Big-Boards) for a LONG time. There may be a few bugs around, but it is a very stable product with proven results.


Q. I have this problem with Zoints SEO, will you help?

A. No.


Q. Uhhh, you do realize you could have sold this for a decent amount of money, right?

A. Yes, but then we would have to support it. Zoints is not an SEO company. Our core focus is our forum network and various supporting solutions.


Q. So I can package Zoints SEO up and sell it as a commercial product right?

A. Nope.

[DementedMindz]

DChapman very nice work nice to see a free Seo product coming out as nice as this.

[Neal-UK]

Shame you will not support this, I get all kind of errors when i turn url rewrite on, and i've edited the .htaccess file correctly.

[Zoints]

Originally Posted by Neal-UK

Shame you will not support this, I get all kind of errors when i turn url rewrite on, and i've edited the .htaccess file correctly.

Well, since you use the Zoints Network, please post here with the following information:

1. Forum url ZSEO is installed on
2. What errors you're receiving
3. What version of mysql you're using.

I'll then assign an engineer to the problem and see what we can do for you.

[Zoints]

Originally Posted by DementedMindz

DChapman very nice work nice to see a free Seo product coming out as nice as this.

Thank you for your kind words

[Snake]

Wow sounds like something. Will check this out soon.

[nimonogi]

After installing an error appear at the top of every page:
Warning: Wrong parameter count for strrpos() in /includes/init.php(317) : eval()'d code on line 31

and when trying to access a thread:
vBulletin Message:
Unable to add cookies, header already sent.
File: /home/core/public_html/includes/class_core.php
Line: 3023

However the URLs are rewrited and the sitemap work fine.

I'm using the .htaccess mod_rewrite option without the custom meta descriptions and keywords.

[Zoints]

Originally Posted by nimonogi

Errors.

Please post the same information requested from Neal. Thanks.

[Moparx]

If you dont accept cookies for a site that is using this you get on infinite redirect loop and can't access the pages. However, If you accept cookies it works just fine.