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!

[Streicher]

Originally posted by Overgrow
Thanks guys,

Streicher, you need to specify which forums are private at the top of index.php. Look for

$privateForums="|17|18|";

and put whatever forums in there that should be hidden. Enclose them with |pipes|. Anyone else having these same problems with reloading, etc?

I know that and i have done it already. But it does not work.

[eva2000]

Originally posted by Streicher


I know that and i have done it already. But it does not work.

same here some private forums disappeared but some didn't

[KeithMcL]

Just finished installing this hack but am having some problems.

I'm getting the error:

"Fatal error: Call to unsupported or undefined function htmlheader() in /home/keith/webdevforums-www/archive/index.php on line 76"

where line 70-78 reads:

header("Status: 200 OK"); 

//echo "<br>&nbsp;<br>$forumID - $year - $month - $week - $threadID";

if (empty($forumID)) {
	htmlHeader();
	forumList();
	exit;

You can see the page at http://www.webdevforums.com/archive/

[Overgrow]

Sorry... please forgive my sloppy coding. I'm running a fever and worshipping the porcelain god. You can either replace the forumList function with that below, or download the new zip:

function forumList() {

	global $db,$baseURL,$privateForums;

	echo "Archives<br>";

	$privateForums=preg_replace("/^\|/","",$privateForums);
	$privateForums=preg_replace("/\|$/","",$privateForums);

	$pfs = explode("|",$privateForums);
	$whereclause="";
	$wherecounter=0;


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

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

	$query = "SELECT title,forumid FROM forum$whereclause ORDER BY forumid ASC";

	$data = $db->select($query);

	if(!empty($data)) {

		while ( list ( $key,$forum ) = each ($data)) {

			echo spacer(1)."<a href=\"$baseURL/$forum[forumid]\">$forum[title]</a><br>";
		}
	}
	
}

[Overgrow]

No clue, coolKeith... Why is your server not capitalizing the function name? See in the code it is htmlHeader() and your server says htmlheader()... Look down in the very bottom of the index.php and you will see the function htmlHeader()... it is there and working. All I can say is try and download it again. If that still doesn't work, change the function name to lower case and see if that helps.

[Streicher]

Thanks Overgrow. It works fine.

And i have find out that only forums with id <10 (1-9) makes a reload of index.php, when clicking on the link.

Originally posted by Overgrow

Anyone else having these same problems with reloading, etc?
.

I have sorted it now it was a problem within .htaccess

Just one problem (I hope ) it all loads up ok no errors or anything but when you click on a forum it loads up but where it should look like below

May
week1
week2
week3
week4

It just displays a page like below

Archives
Competition
2001




vbSpiderFriend by ~shabang~ of Overgrow

any idea what the problem is no doubt something I've done

Here I go again I have sorted the above and the problem was the date is in MM/DD/YYYY I thought I saw DD/MM/YYYY

[Overgrow]

Sorry.. typical N.American-centric time code eh! But that's the way that the php function strtotime is written...

I'm glad people have this working. Now let's hear the success stories in a few months when spiders actually list our posts.