Board Optimization - vBSEO Search Engine XML Sitemap

vBSEO Search Engine XML Sitemap 3.0
We are extremely pleased to inform the vBulletin.org community that a fully revamped version of the vBSEO Search Engine XML Sitemap (previously "vBSEO Google/Yahoo Sitemap Generator") v.3.0, is being released to all licensed vBulletin users effective immediately!

Note: The NEW vBSEO Search Engine XML Sitemap 3.0 replaces all previous versions of the "vBSEO Google/Yahoo Sitemap Generator", and includes support for all the new URL types in vBulletin 4.x.

New in the vBSEO Search Engine XML Sitemap v.3.0
The new sitemap alters the way data is structured in fundamental ways. Sitemap 3.0 segments different content areas into separate files, so you end up with a unique set of files per content type: forums, blogs, cms, groups, albums, members, tags, etc. In addition, the new sitemap has an extended priority feature that utilizes the built in 'weight' tool of the vBulletin XML sitemap generator for individual forums, CMS sections and articles to act as a multiplier.

We believe these changes are responsible for delivering increased returns for a number of forums from customers and testers we've been tracking. Please track your own progress via your Google Webmaster tools account, Google Analytics or Gravity Insights.

A Clean and Beautiful Interface
The new sitemap also features a clean and beautiful interface, built from the ground up. We believe it reflects the quality, precision and attention to detail placed into each aspect of this release. We are passionate about building software, and great software is beautiful inside, and out.

Overview
============================

The "vBSEO Search Engine XML Sitemap" plugin provides an easy to use solution that allows your forum to be indexed by all major search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask, faster, more completely, more effectively, and with less bandwidth consumption.

The ultimate goal is to help you achieve more web traffic for your forum.

Originally Posted by Google's Description of GSM

https://services.google.com/inquiry/publishertools?hl=en_US
Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to help improve your site?s representation in the Google index. It's a collaborative crawling system that enables you to communicate directly with Google. You get a smarter crawl because you can provide Google with specific information about all your web pages, such as when a page was last modified or how frequently it changes.

Note: This plugin is fully compliant with vBSEO 3.5.x versions. The current version is vBSEO 3.5.2. If you are running vBSEO, please upgrade to vBSEO 3.5.2 (or greater) before installing for optimal results.

Compatibility
============================

Fully compatible with:

• vBulletin 3.8.x, 4.0.x, 4.1.x
• vBulletin Blogs *Optional
• vBulletin CMS *Optional
• vBSEO 3.5.2 + higher *Optional

What does it do?
============================

• Auto-generates an XML sitemap for all of your specified forum URL types (including vBulletin Blog & CMS URLs).
• NEW! Groups forum areas into individual sitemaps grouped by section type for greater flexibility, for example:
  • sitemap_forum_X.xml.gz
  • sitemap_tags_X.xml.gz
  • sitemap_cms_X.xml.gz
• Auto-notifies Search Engines when a new sitemap is generated (optional)
• Automatically sends you a summary of the sitemap generation via email each time it is created (optional)
• Includes only publicly accessible forums and threads and includes the option of not including any specific public forums
• Allows Search Engines to find all of your forum URLs without having to spider the forum to find the links. Great for Deep Page linking!
• Allows Search Engines to find your forum URLs without having to account for query string and/or session ID information.
• Allows Search Engines to give precedence to crawling your higher priority forum pages.
• Allows Search Engines to give precedence to crawling your forum pages that change more frequently.
• Allows you to conserve bandwidth by more efficiently facilitating the crawling processes for GoogleBot, Yahoo Slurp, Ask's Teoma, Bing's msnbot, and other search engine bots.
• Is 100% compatible with the static CRUs (Content Relevant URLs) used by vBSEO-enabled forums.
• Is 100% compatible with the 'Friendly URLs' offered default with vb4.x.

How does it work?
============================

Whenever it is scheduled or invoked via the URL, this plugin will generate an XML formatted that search engines are able to read and parse. If you selected "Yes" to the Auto-notification setting, The 4 major search engines will be notified each time the sitemap is generated.

• Google Sitemap files are gzipped for space savings
• Forum and thread pages are listed with pagination (i.e. all pages for each forums/thread are included in the sitemap)
• Maximum Priority is set for Sticky threads.
• Optimization for sitemap generation on large forums.

Automated Reporting Tool
============================

The vBSEO Sitemap includes a report tool, allowing you to track your progress. To access your reports enter the following URL:

http://www.example.com/forums/vbseo_sitemap/

NOTE: Replace "http://www.example.com/forums/" with the full URL to your vB forum root.


You will be required to login by providing your "Sitemap Interface Access Password" from your vBSEO Sitemap settings in:

• vBulletin Admin CP -> vBSEO -> vBSEO Sitemap Settings
  

Once you successfully login, you will see a number of tabs. Here are the 4 main links:

Reports List
The 'Show Reports List' link will display a report of each time your vBSEO Sitemap generator executed, including the (1) date, (2) run time, (3) total URLs included, and (4) and change in # of URLs included from the last generation.

Each vBSEO Sitemap generation record will include a (1) "View details" and (2) "Remove record" link. The "View Details" link shows more detailed information about the sitemap generated. The "Remove record" will permanently delete the record from your reports.

Downloads Log
The 'Show Sitemap Downloads Log' link will display a report of each time your vBSEO Sitemap was downloaded by either a search engine (Identified by the Bot's name) or by another user agent (i.e. Web browser, etc.).

The report includes the (1) date, (2) name of sitemap file downloaded, (3) Bot, (4) IP address of the downloader, and the (5) User-agent.

Each vBSEO Sitemap download record will include a "Remove record" link which will permanently delete the record from your reports.

Search Engine Bots Activity Log
Use it to track Search engine activity on your sitemaps. This area displays how often, and what volume of pages search engines visit your site on a daily basis.

Run Generator
The 'Run Sitemap Generator' link will automatically regenerate your vBSEO Search Engine XML Site sitemaps.

Additional Links
Additional links to various other related Search Engine/SEO resources are also included.

Click "Install"
============================
Please click "Mark as Installed" to show your support for this script.

Installation, Upgrade, & Configuration
============================
Follow the installation/upgrade instructions provided in the docs/readme.html file.

Webmaster Accounts
============================
It is NOT required for you to have a Webmaster account on the search engines' websites to run the plugin, however, we recommend everyone set one up for tracking purposes.

• Google Webmaster Central. Get data about crawling, indexing and search traffic. Increase traffic to your site.
• Bing Toolbox
• https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Copyright & Licensing
============================

• vBSEO Search Engine XML Sitemap plugin is copyright protected by Crawlability Inc.
• You are free to download and install this plugin on any vBulletin forum for which you hold a valid vB license.
• Unauthorized distribution of any code and/or documentation, whole or in part, included here is strictly prohibited.
• In addition, the following copyright notice must be maintained.

vBSEO(TM) ? 2010 Crawlability, Inc.

Revision History
============================

11/11/2010 - Version 3.0 Released
Compatible with vB3.7.x+ and vB4.x+
NEW FEATURE: All CMS URLs are supported
NEW FEATURE: Sitemap Groups by content type
NEW FEATURE: Enhanced layout and design of the Sitemap Generator Control Panel
NEW FEATURE: XSL Style sheet of the xml files for easier human reading
NEW FEATURE: Extended Priority. Utilizes the built in 'weight' tool of the vBulletin XML generator for all content areas (Forums, Blogs, CMS, Albums, etc.) to act as a multiplier. (vb4 Suite only)

Other vBSEO Plugins
============================

• vBSEO - vBulletin Search Engine Optimization

vBSEO Affiliate Program
============================
We welcome you to join the vBSEO Affiliate Program.

[Manoel J?nior]

Originally Posted by mykkal

How long has it been you re-installed? Also, Have you added each entry to you robots.txt?

Btw be careful using the words VBSEO around here. There are anti-VBSEO armies. The war never ended for them.

I reinstalled makes about 1 month because I have acquired vBET translator. My robots are wide open:

PHP Code:

User-Agent: *
allow: / 


And what do you mean by: "Btw be careful using the words VBSEO around here. There are anti-VBSEO armies. The war never ended for them."

Originally Posted by bosanci28

Same problem for me too, submitted about 200 and indexed only 3! Hmmm.

Recently I know that Google changed its SEO mechanism, I think it reflected a lot on vBSEO. It remains we wait the comments from people who understand one few more SEO than us to be able to help us.

[e24h]

I for what ever reason decided to go to my manage domains page and just decided to click away to see how google was doing with crawling my site and such..

Well I noticed that for some reason google was saying that there is an error and was not able to crawl my site and forums as well as not being able to access the sitemap...

I believe its something to do with google themselves, I wouldn't worry to much about it, wait a few days maybe a couple of weeks and then see if they are still having problems with the sitemaps....

Please not, that was the issue with me it could of course be something completely different with you.

[bosanci28]

Originally Posted by Manoel J?nior

Recently I know that Google changed its SEO mechanism, I think it reflected a lot on vBSEO. It remains we wait the comments from people who understand one few more SEO than us to be able to help us.

Yes, Maybe someone with more knowledge can explain little better.
But still i am debating if i should stay with this mod or move to DragonByte SEO Lite if it will be more better.

[mykkal]

A few things... You probably have duplicate content if VBSEO isn't configured right. I have close to 100k pages indexed and the number is going up.

It takes a lot of time for search engines to index unless you are getting lots of traffic. I get lots of traffic.

• Your pages will be penalized if they do not have a mobile version per Google's highly publicized recent update. You can purchase a responsive skin but no mods will work with a responsive skin.
• Set your archive options to 301 Redirect vB's Archive Thread Pages. If you don't you will have duplicate content and will have pages dropped from indexing.
• Turn on Cleanup HTML Code.
• Make sure Replace the 'META DESCRIPTION' Content is set to yes
• Add rel="nofollow" to ALL External URLs set to yes
• Enable Canonical URLs must be set to yes
• Inside your sitemap settings set Include Forum Display Pages to no
• Inside your sitemap settings set Include Show Post Pages to no
• test your site score in google pagespeed. A low score means low priority being indexed and Google shows you in search results less even if you are indexed. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

[Manoel J?nior]

Originally Posted by bosanci28

Yes, Maybe someone with more knowledge can explain little better.
But still i am debating if i should stay with this mod or move to DragonByte SEO Lite if it will be more better.

I previously was using bad DBSEO did not like, was not quite indexing my pages, some bugs and every week had a version to download.

The DBSEO support is only made out of vBulletin and also did not like it, I preferred to leave and return to the same vBSEO unsupported seems much higher.

[Manoel J?nior]

Originally Posted by mykkal

A few things... You probably have duplicate content if VBSEO isn't configured right. I have close to 100k pages indexed and the number is going up.

It takes a lot of time for search engines to index unless you are getting lots of traffic. I get lots of traffic.

• Your pages will be penalized if they do not have a mobile version per Google's highly publicized recent update. You can purchase a responsive skin but no mods will work with a responsive skin.
• Set your archive options to 301 Redirect vB's Archive Thread Pages. If you don't you will have duplicate content and will have pages dropped from indexing.
• Turn on Cleanup HTML Code.
• Make sure Replace the 'META DESCRIPTION' Content is set to yes
• Add rel="nofollow" to ALL External URLs set to yes
• Enable Canonical URLs must be set to yes
• Inside your sitemap settings set Include Forum Display Pages to no
• Inside your sitemap settings set Include Show Post Pages to no
• test your site score in google pagespeed. A low score means low priority being indexed and Google shows you in search results less even if you are indexed. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

So far there had Google messages about duplicate content, it is working very well.

[mykkal]

Originally Posted by Manoel J?nior

I reinstalled makes about 1 month because I have acquired vBET translator. My robots are wide open:

And what do you mean by: "Btw be careful using the words VBSEO around here. There are anti-VBSEO armies. The war never ended for them."

You need to add individual entries to your robots.txt for search engines like ASK.COM and others that don't have webmaster tools you can directly submit sitemaps in. That will help a lot. Believe it or not search engines actually crawl each other so getting listed in one helps you rank in another.

The syntax is like this:

sitemap: yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

Originally Posted by Manoel J?nior

I previously was using bad DBSEO did not like, was not quite indexing my pages, some bugs and every week had a version to download.

The DBSEO support is only made out of vBulletin and also did not like it, I preferred to leave and return to the same vBSEO unsupported seems much higher.

The anti-vbseo armies will be here soon. I wish you hadn't done that.

Originally Posted by e24h

I for what ever reason decided to go to my manage domains page and just decided to click away to see how google was doing with crawling my site and such..

Well I noticed that for some reason google was saying that there is an error and was not able to crawl my site and forums as well as not being able to access the sitemap...

This is not going to fix itself. VBSEO will not help you. You need to figure out what is keeping the search engines from crawling... Start with making sure your site isn't being gzipped (compressed) more than once.

Originally Posted by bosanci28

Yes, Maybe someone with more knowledge can explain little better.
But still i am debating if i should stay with this mod or move to DragonByte SEO Lite if it will be more better.

I use VBSEO for three reasons only:

• The sitemap integrates nicely with vbet translator.
• The canonical url is displayed in the sitemap. The vbulletin url display isn't canonical and it can keep you from being indexed as the urls it submits have priority and can conflict with the canonical url if you have custom urls written.
• It supports memcached caching. I distribute my caching across multiple servers for efficiency.

[Manoel J?nior]

Thanks for the tips friend about robots.txt I just added.

About anti-vBSEO army I understand now what you meant, and I wish this army does not interfere in our postanges.

[mykkal]

Originally Posted by Manoel J?nior

Thanks for the tips friend about robots.txt I just added.

About anti-vBSEO army I understand now what you meant, and I wish this army does not interfere in our postanges.

You may also want to read this thread. Make sure your sitemap and canonical urls match. Check the source of your page to be sure. And if you are using VBSEO sitemap disable/delete your vbulletin native sitemap if you have vb4 or vb5 installed.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?p=2546495

[Manoel J?nior]

Originally Posted by mykkal

You may also want to read this thread. Make sure your sitemap and canonical urls match. Check the source of your page to be sure. And if you are using VBSEO sitemap disable/delete your vbulletin native sitemap if you have vb4 or vb5 installed.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?p=2546495

Thank you, deactivated native sitempa vBulletin and am also following the topic that you recommended.