Google sitemap for the vB Archives. Redirect human and robots.

Release V1.2 (9 Nov 2005)
* Higher sitemap priority rate is given to threads with new posts. So Google can index fresh threads first.

* Not recommending the original optional STEP 3 hack. To avoid potential Google penalty, my advice is to remove the STEP 3 hack.

Release V1.1a (12 Oct 2005)

* Bug fix only

Release V1.1 (9 Oct 2005)

* Can handle very large forums with more than 50,000 URLs per forum
URLs will be spanned through multiple files for each large forum.

* Created a function to detect search engine crawlers. The vB built-in
search engine detector can only identify about 3 or 4 search engines.
My function will detect over 20 search engine crawlers.

* Support forums hosted by web servers that do not support 'fix_pathinfo'
ie. instead of the usual 'archive/index.php/f-10.html' link. These
forums have a link as 'archive/index.php?f-10.html'.

* Alert about wrong directory permissions to help newbies.

* Automatically write index file to archive directory if the php
script can not write into the base vB directory.

* Bug fixes.


Objectives
==============

• Create Google sitemap files and sitemap index file for vB archives, submit to Google by the Scheduled Tasks.
• To have the vB Archive used as a mirror to the actual threads.
• Google loves the nature of the archive pages, as they are static and do not contain repeated contents.
• Google gauge pages heavily based on external links. We need to redirect these external thread links to the archive pages.
• We often see vbulletin archive in the Google search results, but the users are taken to the archive page instead of the actual threads. We need to automatically redirect visitors to the actual threads instead of the archive. Otherwise the visitor either need to reclick for the Full Version or read the dull archive contents.

Q and A
==============
Q. Would the sitemap contain the links for hidden forums?
A. No, the forum permission was consulted while generating the sitemap files.

Q. How often are the sitemap files generated?
A. You decide and set in the Scheduled Tasks. The script can not be called by external user by default to prevent boring people killing your server.

Q. Is the sitemap file compressed.
A. Yes, the multiple sitemap files are gunziped according to Google sitemap standard to save bandwidth. Sitemap index file is not compressed, it is submitted as a normal xml file.

Q. Would the sitemaps include links for the normal threads? eg. showthread.php?t=1234...
A. No, it is unlikely Google will index your entire site if you feed it with all the combination of showthread links. It is better to let Google going through the more static archives. You will have a better chance for sure to have more thread contents indexed by Google this way.

Q. Why don't you go crazy about rewrite rules and do things like including thread title as the url.
A. I won't deny having keywords in the url is a good SEO strategy, but Google also does not like "Over Search Engine Optimized" web sites. Google has recently penalized a huge number of such sites. Sending them from page rank of 5, 6 to 0.

Q. Does sitemap really help?
A. Definitely, Google has done over 60,000 pages since I submitted my sitemaps a few days ago. Yahoo bots were visiting more pages than Google before the sitemap. I expect the total Google visits for this month will be exceeding Yahoo in the next one or two days.

What is involved?
==================
I have divided this hack into two steps. The first step involves unloading a php file. This enables the sitemap to be generated and submitted to Google.

The second step involves installing a Plugin using AdminCP. This sends all robots to the archive pages, preventing them viewing the actual threads.

For example, Google/Other Crawlers follows an external link to visit:
http://forums.mysite/showthread.php?t=1234&page=2

It will be told this page is permanently relocated to:
http://forums.mysite/archive/index.php/t-1234-p-2

This way you don't lose page rank gain from external links.

Install
=========
To install, follow the readme file.
To let me know you have installed this and let me send update information to you. Please click INSTALL .

Strategy
=========

It is unlikely Google/other Search Engine will index your entire site, especially due to the dynamic nature of the vbulletin forums. An archive sitemap will let Google concentrate on the real contents of your forums -- the threads. If Google needs to go through the endless member profile pages. It will get sick of it and just become tired.(sorry, perhaps robots can not become tired). What we can do is disallowing the crawling of unneccessary pages. My robots.txt contains:

#ALL BOTS
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admincp/
Disallow: /ajax.php
Disallow: /attachments/
Disallow: /clientscript/
Disallow: /cpstyles/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /install/
Disallow: /modcp/
Disallow: /subscriptions/
Disallow: /customavatars/
Disallow: /customprofilepics/
Disallow: /announcement.php
Disallow: /attachment.php
Disallow: /calendar.php
Disallow: /cron.php
Disallow: /editpost.php
Disallow: /external.php
Disallow: /faq.php
Disallow: /frm_attach
Disallow: /image.php
#Disallow: /index.php
Disallow: /inlinemod.php
Disallow: /joinrequests.php
Disallow: /login.php
Disallow: /member.php?
Disallow: /memberlist.php
Disallow: /misc.php
Disallow: /moderator.php
Disallow: /newattachment.php
Disallow: /newreply.php
Disallow: /newthread.php
Disallow: /online.php
Disallow: /payment_gateway.php
Disallow: /payments.php
Disallow: /poll.php
Disallow: /postings.php
Disallow: /printthread.php
Disallow: /private.php
Disallow: /profile.php
Disallow: /register.php
Disallow: /report.php
Disallow: /reputation.php
Disallow: /search.php
Disallow: /sendmessage.php
Disallow: /showgroups.php
Disallow: /showpost.php
Disallow: /subscription.php
Disallow: /usercp.php
Disallow: /threadrate.php
Disallow: /usercp.php
Disallow: /usernote.php

You perhaps have noticed I included index.php in there. Apparently Google regards http://forums.mysite/index.html as same as http://forums.mysite/
...but http://forums.mysite/index.php as a different file. The default vB templates include index.php as the internal link. That will spread your page rank on your home page! So it is better off not letting Google see this file.

If you have rewrite installed. Perhaps you could add to the .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$
RewriteRule ^index.php$ / [R=301,L]

(if your forums are under http://site/forums/. Try: RewriteRule ^forums/index.php$ forums/ [R=301,L])

That will redirect /index.php to /, but only if no query_string is presented. ie. /index.php?do=mymod will not be redirected.

[lierduh]

Originally Posted by sHORTYWZ

Since upgrading I've had major problems with this.. I'm running two forums and have had identical problems on each.

I test out the script and it generates the indexes correctly, however sometime down the road a few crons later the script somehow ends up generating a .gz for EVERY thread on my forum causing my /archive directory to contain thousands of .gz's and my index file to be almost a meg.

This seems to be the same problem that Triple_T is having.

Any ideas?

Ok, please list some examples of the file names and its contents. Without having the same problem. It can be hard for me to find the bug.

I honestly did not know what Triple_T was talking about though it makes more sense now.

[buro9]

Originally Posted by lierduh

Ok, please list some examples of the file names and its contents. Without having the same problem. It can be hard for me to find the bug.

I honestly did not know what Triple_T was talking about though it makes more sense now.

I actually saw this today.

I couldn't get it to do it when I ran the cron manually from the admincp, but the scheduled task being run by the schedule did just this.

I had somewhere in the region of half a 100,00 files splattered around before I managed to kill the process (by nuking the MySql process and also restarting httpd). It took about 15 minutes running "rm -f *" against batches of 5,000 *.gz items at a time to delete them all.

I thought it was just me!

Anyhow... my cron job log output for this task is attached. Beware that the single logged job expands to 7.68mb of log file!

Fun

[lierduh]

I have nailed down the bug.
Please download new version (V1.1a)!

[buro9]

Originally Posted by lierduh

I have nailed down the bug.
Please download new version (V1.1a)!

Fantastic response

I shall test it straight away

[buro9]

Yup, this one has fixed it.

Thanks very muchly... it's damn early there, so I'm guessing that was a pre-shower fix, much respect for it.

[dutchbb]

very fast,thank you

[lierduh]

Originally Posted by buro9

a pre-shower fix.

Yes, it was a pre-shower release.

[Suiko Jin]

I am confused on step three. I have read the little diff sheets and the color charts but I don't get alot of it. Like on the yellow/changed line things.... do I change the code all together? Like on the index diff code chart on line 317, do I change that whole first yellow section on the left to the code on the right? or do I add the code on the right with it? Bah... very confusing since some of the code on other lines that it does this with seems to be exactly the same.

[buro9]

Originally Posted by Suiko Jin

I am confused on step three. I have read the little diff sheets and the color charts but I don't get alot of it. Like on the yellow/changed line things.... do I change the code all together? Like on the index diff code chart on line 317, do I change that whole first yellow section on the left to the code on the right? or do I add the code on the right with it? Bah... very confusing since some of the code on other lines that it does this with seems to be exactly the same.

I use the text diff files.

And very basically:
Lines that start '<' need removing in your version
Lines that start '>' need adding in your version

I find text diff's much more friendly and when you start changing the code you'll find it's easier than you think. Just look at the code and you'll see lierduh is removing the PDA stuff, redirecting real people to the threads and making things nicer for such spiders.

[Brandon Sheley]

I'll give this a shot again
and i get this error when i chmod the root and arcives to 777 as the instructions say :|

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@locoforum.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.


Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

:ermm: