vbSpiderFriend - Search Engine Friendliness

I am tired of my 200,000 posts not being listed in Google. I was inspired by phpbuilder.com this morning and I wrote:

vbSpiderFriend - the search engine indexer for all of your posts

Purpose: Allow search engine spiders to crawl a linked list of all of your posts.

Project Requirements:

-Friendly URLs (no query strings)
-Good dynamic meta tags
-Never have to touch the script again.. It is Y3K compliant, simply re-submit to the engines to update your listings

Install Requirements:

-vBulletin 1.x or 2.x
-about 10 minutes


1) Download the attached Zip.

2) Open class.mysql.php and put your database login info at the top.

3) Create a new directory called archive under your forum, like /forum/archive

4) Open the included .htaccess and change the Error 404 to your new archive path.

5) Open index.php and change the self-explanatory variables at the top of the file.

6) Upload all 3 files to your archive directory.

7) Submit /forum/archive/index.php to search engines and watch em crawl


DISCLAIMER: I don't use 2.x but I checked the schema and this should work fine.

NOTES: This uses ErrorDocument and query string parsing to get the variables needed. I do not have the time or energy to troubleshoot this if it does not work on your server. Sorry!

[Brian]

gotcha make sence

[Brian]

Here is an odd question. If I have more forums private then public it would be easier for me to on the top just list the ones I want displayed. What would I need to do to change it so it only displays the ones I want. I know I could simply put all the ones I dont want on top but I have a ton of the ones I dont want displayed and just a few of the ones I do want displayed.

[Overgrow]

(This is untested) Make your changes to the top variable and...

Find:

PHP Code:

if (eregi("[a-z]",$forumID) or $forumID < 1 or 
strstr($privateForums,"|".$forumID."|")) 


Replace with:

PHP Code:

if (eregi("[a-z]",$forumID) or $forumID < 1 or 
!strstr($privateForums,"|".$forumID."|")) 


Find:

PHP Code:

while($pf=array_shift($pfs)) {
        if(ereg("[0-9]",$pf)) {

            if($wherecounter==0) {
                $whereclause= " WHERE forumid!='$pf'";
                $wherecounter++;
            } else {
                $whereclause .= " AND forumid!='$pf'";
            }
        }
     } 


Replace with:

PHP Code:

while($pf=array_shift($pfs)) {
        if(ereg("[0-9]",$pf)) {

            if($wherecounter==0) {
                $whereclause= " WHERE forumid='$pf'";
                $wherecounter++;
            } else {
                $whereclause .= " AND forumid='$pf'";
            }
        }
     } 


[julius]

Overgrow, great hack!

I don't know why, but some threads are not displayed.

If I put a link to the archive, at the bottom of myhomepage.com (not forum index) of the same color of the background, so it is invisible, it would be fine to google?

[gmyachtsman]

This looks great !!

I'd love to get the search engines' notice.

Yesterday I just purchased VBulletin. I am hosted on a server that supports .php, .php3 .phtml, and .php4 (HostRocket). When I went to download from VBulletin, I was faced with this surprise:

Click here to download vBulletin version 2.0.1 with .PHP file extensions (default).

Click here to download vBulletin version 2.0.1 with .PHP3 file extensions.

Well, I chose .PHP3 file extensions, not knowing the differences.

Will your hack work on that version? Should I change to .PHP instead?

[jarvis]

Does anyone have this running under IIS? I have set the custom error 404 to point to my /archive/index.php but all I get from the links generated by the hack is:

a) the unparsed php code of /archive/index.php

or

b) 404 file not found (only if I let IIS do the 404 default redirects)

Ideas?

Thanks!!

[etones]

i's change to the .PHP version, it will be better for you in the future.

[jarvis]

i's change to the .PHP version

PHP version of what? My homepage? My question pertains more to getting this running under IIS which is handling vB fine, but many of the hacks are intended for unix-based systems. I'm just curious if anyone has my configuration?

Thanks!

[gmyachtsman]

Thanks, etones. I replaced the php3 version with php. In addition to installing the php files in place of the php3 file, I had to edit my database to replace all the "php3" references with "php". The results were very good!! Just about all my changes were preserved.

Then I went on to install VBSpiderfriend. It is working fine now, but I had the following problems:

1. I had not realized that VB adds a /~databasename folder into the file path. I was trying to make the path work that was in my own directory (not what actually shows up on the URL itself).

2. I had named my archive folder "webarchive" instead of "archive". Before I fixed (1) above, while my first page list of forums showed up fine, when I clicked through, I got a standard 404 file not found error. After I fixed (1) above I got a file not found error right on the front page (this was a different error template...one I had modified for my own site's use). What I learned: the archive folder must have that exact name.

3. Every time I uploaded it, my .htaccess file would disappear without a trace. But I guessed it was there, since it kept overwriting itself and now it is working (though still invisible).

Next for the customizing, the outside links, better Meta tags, etc (the easy parts).

Thanks, Outgrow, for a beauty.

[Bane]

I have tried every variation I can think of in my .htaccess file and cant seem to get this to work.

Either it will go to http://www.influx9.com/archive/3
or http://www.influx9.com/archive/index.php and just relist

I have tried a lot of variations on the .htaccess file.. even just the http://www.influx9.com/archive/index.php (which will make it reload) any ideas what Im doing wrong? My FTP client puts the file at /home/influx9/www/archive/index.php