Board Optimization - Canonical URLs For CLogic SEO

Canonical URLs for CLogic SEO
Released By - Binary Basketball Forums

I have written a plug-in for vBulletin that will add a canonical link for vBulletin forums using CLogic SEO. Currently, the aim of CLogic SEO is to provide a simple SEO solution for re-writing URLs which is good because the previous project (Zoints) had plenty of issues.

The Problem
While CLogic does a fantastic job writing URLs, it writes plenty of them. It's not CLogic's fault, or vBulletin's fault. Different threads can be accessed in different ways. If you are viewing a thread and you go to the new post you would either notice &goto=newpost somewhere in your URL. Unfortunately, while that's handy for users, it provides another URL for Google to see that has the same content. Google doesn't know which one to index or sees it as spam pages which devalues your ranking in search engines.

The Solution
Google, Yahoo, and those other guys all agreed to follow a standard to help them rank people. That they created the standard of using a link tag with the rel="canonical" attribute to tell search engines which URL is the URL that should be ranked.

Blog platforms already do this and some forums have started to do this as well. Unfortunately it hasn't caught on to everybody. While SEOvB Link Canonicalization is a great plugin, it doesn't work with the CLogic re-written URL's.

Requirements
You must have C-Logic SEO installed and using it to re-write your URLs in order for this mod to work at this time. For the next release I plan to add more functionality to this mod. For now, DO NOT use this mod if you do not have C-Logic installed AND using it to rewrite your URLs or it.

Install Instructions
Upload attached product-bbcanonical.xml file to your vBulletin forums using the built in product manager

For a demo, you can check out Link Canonicalization for CLogic SEO in action by viewing the source of that page. Notice the URL ends with arguments but the code inserted into the header is

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.binarybasketball.com/forums/canonical-url-for-clogic-seo-t9553.html" />

This is my first hack for vBulletin but now that CLogic has resurrected a decent SEO program, I plan to release more SEO vBulletin hacks for those either unwilling or unable to pay for vBSEO.

Please mark installed to support this mod.

*Added dependencies to 1.1 (thanks NLP-er)

*Update to version 1.1
URL for page# > 1 points to the right direction

[Serenity278]

Works great but there seems to be a phrase or something missing. Because in the vboptions there is a blank spot where the option should be.

[RedeemedWarrior]

i concur with the user above same issue

[binaryg]

I am aware of that. I am developing the code to include a section in ACP where you can set up the mod for use on both C-Logic SEO rewritten URLs and standard vBulletin rewritten URLs and I took NLP-er's advice and quickly threw the product file dependencies in and uploaded the program. Well, I used the current code which doesn't have all of the options.

The blank space is there but doesn't do anything and is harmless. I realized this when I saw it in my forum but figured it was harmless and the next update will quickly take care of it.

I apologize for any confusion it may have caused.

The next release should be pretty soon and it will not depend solely on C-Logic SEO. As for the future options, I've extended the features of this mod on my forum to only display the rewritten URL to guests. I've also found modifications that use and display vBulletin URLs in their original form despite C-Logic rewriting them and I used the base of this code to fix those errors.

In the future releases, I hope to extend this code to become sort of a sister product of C-Logic because nobody should be satisfied with just using mod_rewrite to restructure their URLs. The effectiveness of URL structure has been debated by plenty of people and whatever your stance, it should not be the only search engine optimization you do for your site.

I love the direction dxlwebs is taking with his software and look forward to the sitemaps and linkback features he is working on. I'm just trying to do my small part to extend the search engine optimization of a standard vBulletin forum because I support free software and I believe that the paid options are over-priced.