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!

[buro9]

Originally posted by drazq
Well,

Just now I posted a new post in one of my open forums, and it didn't show up in 2002 - March - Week 3 or Week 4. It should be there right ..

- draz Q.

Without an indexer I'm unsure where you're looking for that information. The directory structure created in that version doesn't have week numbers!?

The indexer isn't yet in the hack, which is why it's status is only as a Beta.

At the moment it will produce the files on the docroot for each and every post... but there are no index.htm files tying them all together.

In response to pigsy, this means that the few people who have installed would not be seeing gains yet, as no spider would be able to crawl a non-indexed directory structure.

The indexer is work for me next week.
Latter part of next week is improvements to the templates to optimise them for search engines.

Again... unless you're are a developer, there's no point in you're having this script yet... when it's finished it will be in the normal Full Releases forum and then I shall support it fully. At the moment it is a development Beta, to find bugs on various platforms, and take suggestions for improvements prior to it's completion.

I have never finished a piece of code construction without a Beta review stage, and just because this is a hack it doesn't mean I'm going to lower my coding standards for the testing and release process.

When it's finished, then go ahead and install and criticise

Cheers

David K

[drazq]

pigsy: I should think so. If you have a message board on a certain topic, and some users discussing that topic, then you will have a lot of messages - with a lot of keywords - all indexed in Goolge.

So .. people searching on the topic should be able to find one of your messages

.. *bump* .. anyone know what my problem is?

- draz Q.

[drazq]

Ups .. buro posted a second before me!

>Without an indexer I'm unsure where you're looking for that
>information. The directory structure created in that version
>doesn't have week numbers!?

I'm browsing with IE! .. we are talking about the same hack here? Overgrow's hack? ..

I know it doesn't create any .html files, it just forwards the 404 response to that single index.php and retrieves the messages form the db using info from the $REQUEST_URI variable ..

Anyhow, the messages should be there if there isn't some error in the way the messages are retrieved from the database ..

- draz Q.

[buro9]

lol, this is precisely why I didn't want my hack tagged onto the end of overgrow's!

the last few pages are discussing a new hack that produces static files... this hack is in beta and can be viewed here:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...threadid=36000

the difference is that overgrow's relies on the database, whereas i've chosen to produce static files and rely on those.

if you have issues with overgrow's hack, you're in the right place. any issues with my hac... move over to the other thread.

cheers

David K

[drazq]

hehe .. ok .. well, overgrow, are you alive??

- draz Q.

[dlst]

Hi Overgrow, thanks for the hack and all the hard work.

I'm having the same troulbe eva2000 reported a while back but the fix doesn't work for me, and I'm stumped. The URL to the archive is:

http://www.offshoreonly.com/forum/archive/index.php

I get "no posts" page no matter which week I choose. I did what you suggested below, and here is a sample query:

SELECT title,threadid,lastpost FROM thread WHERE lastpost > '1010469600' AND lastpost < '1010988000' AND forumid='3' ORDER BY dateline ASC

Looks fine to me, and indeed, when run in phpmyadmin it returns no errors, but oddly, it also returns no rows. I thought this might be a date problem but the date format on the boards is stock, and is the US format.

Everything else works, including when you enter in a manual thread id:

http://www.offshoreonly.com/forum/archive/3/2002/01/2 (no posts)

http://www.offshoreonly.com/forum/ar...2002/01/2/1143 (there's a thread)

I don't really know if this is a valid way of accessing them, or if it really helps to know, but it seems that everything is working but the query to show a list of thread titles...

Anyway, any help you could offer would be greatly appreciated.

-dlst

Originally posted by Overgrow
Does it tell you "No posts, please go back" ?

Does it give you a totally blank screen?

or does it at least show what forum you are in?

This change is just for eva to troubleshoot... FIND

echo spacer(2)."Dates: $date1 to $date2<br>&nbsp;<br>";

	$query = "SELECT title,threadid,lastpost FROM thread 
WHERE lastpost > '$ts1' AND lastpost < '$ts2' 
AND forumid='$forumID' ORDER BY dateline ASC";

change to

echo spacer(2)."Dates: $date1 to $date2<br>&nbsp;<br>";

	$query = "SELECT title,threadid,lastpost FROM thread 
WHERE lastpost > '$ts1' AND lastpost < '$ts2' 
AND forumid='$forumID' ORDER BY dateline ASC";

echo $query;

Then when it spits the query out, run it in phpmyadmin and see if it is a valid query.

[veedee]

Is this hack still recent?
Will it work on my version 2.2.4
Can I just use the files listen on the first post?

So many questions...

[Learner29]

and the question remains open .....

we have two hacks here.....

Overgrow's hack that I truly do not have the courage to install as so many users are complaining about the no-post and other- similar errors....

and now we have the new hack of buro9

Like everybody else, I am going to check buro's hack.

But, what about overgrow's ??? is the hack available for download the final one ???

[MyMatchmakerCom]

<< url removed >>

Get a 500 error and I tried just about every kind of path and still no cigar.

You should write a self install script for it please.

[DarkReaper]

Is there a way to get it to know which forums are private automatically, and not display those? I've got too big of a forum to manually maintain all the private forum ids.