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.

[Robru]

Step 3
=================================================================================

This step is to redirect human visitors to your actual threads.
When people do a Web/Google search and when they 
click on the search result (note, Search Engine only index our archive 
pages now), instead of taking the visitors to the plain archive pages. 
The visitor will be taken to the actual forum threads!

This step involves change of code. There are number of places you need 
to change. I have include the diff result between the final files and 
original files. Two files involved are archive/global.php and archive/index.php

You can use the coloured diff: diff_for_modified_vb_files.zip
or use the plain old diff: diff_global.php.txt and diff_index.php.txt
(It will be appreciated if someone can write a step by step instruction
to change these two files):)

For the archive/global.php file. I added output compression to save 
bandwidth. I have also got rid of the pda links.

Please post your questions to the thread and click Install.

[Robru]

I notice this download is only a upgrade?

[dutchbb]

Originally Posted by falter

Well! I've backed-out the cloaking after the number of my indexed pages on google went from >40,000 to just over 800. I'm assuming that we got penalized in some form. My PR is still a 5, but that doesn't mean much of anything at all.

I can honestly say that my opinion is reversed on the cloaking side of things. I do not recommend implementing step 3.

Yes, jagger could be the main cause.

It's just not worth the risk and there are better ways to do it anyway. My archive now works like a sitemap, so visitors and spiders are redirected to the actual threads with a legit redirect. This actually works pretty good as we can see, our pages in google did go from 600 to 15000 in a few weeks.

You can do this yourself or use vbseo like I did. It's not cheap though

[DrHUS]

for security purpose & instant of giving 777 for base vB directory,
you can upload an empty file to base vB directory (as sitemap.xml) with 666 ..

[futuregizmo]

noob question, but is this hack exclusive to 3.5.1 or would this work in 3.5.0 too?

[poprulz]

Originally Posted by futuregizmo

noob question, but is this hack exclusive to 3.5.1 or would this work in 3.5.0 too?

i got the same question..does it work with 3.5 gold?

[lierduh]

It works for 3.5.0 too.

[poprulz]

I got a problem here.
The forum url is domain.com/forums/
and archive domain.com/forums/archive/

I changed the directory such that the forums and archive is writable(#777). But when i call up the function in the browser...i get the following error... What might be the reason?

"The directory containing /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/mallupride.com/httpdocs/forums/archive/forums_sitemap.php cannot be world writable. "

[JCD]

Could it be that spiders are no longer redirected to the archive when having upgraded to 3.5.1? Before upgrading, it worked great, but now spiders are showing up crawling the regular threads.

[poprulz]

I installed the extension..and its been 2 weeks, still google crawls only the main page and the search results are shown frm the main page.
I am using vbadvanced and vb3.5.0
The sitemap is been properly generated n submitted on a daily basis.Wot could have gone wrong?
The google result shows the following.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.mallupride.com/&hl=en

Thanx in advance!