Integration with vBulletin - Zoints Thread Tags - GREAT for SEO

Demo:

http://network.zoints.com/tags

If you choose to send tags to Zoints (optional) you can see what we do with them and how we send you traffic and nice inbound links: http://zoints.com

A great article on the importance of tagging can be read here.

The Zoints Thread Tags System will improve forum side search, SEO, and traffic for forums that choose to utilize it. And in my opinion, it's just plain cool

When a member creates a new thread, they can now input a series of "tags". Tags are simply keywords that describe the thread.



If you then go to your-forum.com/tags you will be presented with what is called a "tag cloud". The more times a tag is used, the larger the text grows. As you can see, the tags are also searchable.



Clicking on one of the tags in the cloud then lists all of the threads that are tagged with that particular keyword. The default option lists tags in a forumdisplay format. There is an option in the admincp to use a simple format.



Clicking on the thread title of one of the above threads then takes you to the thread. If you have the option on, the tags the thread are tagged with are also listed above the thread. Clicking one of those tags takes you to all the threads on the forum tagged with the same tag. Search engine spiders are going to have a field day with this



The thread starter and moderation staff have a slightly different view which allows for administration of tags:



The forum's tags are also searchable via the search dropdown. The advanced search option allows for a variety of additional criteria to be seached for. Your members create a whole new (and highly efficient) forum search engine!



If you have the option on in the admincp and register your forum, once every hour, your tagged threads in publically viewable forums are linked via the corresponding interest tag on the Zoints Forum Network. For example, if you go to http://zoints.com/tag/children you will see what is pictured below. Not only is this a great relevant inbound link for SEO, but you will get traffic from Zoints direct to these threads!

Another example of this in action: http://zoints.com/tag/music




The admincp options

















Official support for this modification will be at http://network.zoints.com in this forum.


Change log:
2008/05/01 - 1.2.3
* vBulletin CSRF Protocol Compatible
2007/12/24 - 1.2.2
* Security patch

2006/10/24 - 1.2.1
* Bugfix: breaking inline moderation when tag cloud below posts
* Bugfix: ajax input not working when tag cloud below posts
* Bugfix: seo hook effective for "results as threads" option
* Bugfix: Autogenerated tags have "quot" removed
* Bugfix: Automated template edit screwing up styles
* Improved instructions for manual template edits

2006/10/19 - 1.2.0
* Option to display results as threads
* Advanced search page
* Popular tag cloud pagination
* Popular tags displayed in forums
* Option to display tags in showthread at the top/bottom
* Fix for vbadvanced products navbar links
* Other minor fixes and tweaks

2006/10/02 - 1.1.2
* Bugfix: Foreign language characters in thread description
* Bugfix: Commas showing up when removing first tag in showthread via ajax
* Removing some redundancy in the tags AJAX removal

2006/09/30 - 1.1.1
* Bugfix: Preventing all HTML from being parsed inside tag descriptions

2006/09/30 - 1.1.0
* Adding and deleting tags from showthread via AJAX
* Mass-deleting single tags from entire cloud for admins
* Automatically generate tags for older threads (with option to show or hide on main cloud)
* Automatically stripping out tiny (2 or less characters) tags

2006/09/28 - 1.0.8
* Minor bugfix

2006/09/28 - 1.0.7
* Bugfix for required tagging

2006/09/28 - 1.0.6
* Character replacements
* Tag limit per thread
* Option to require tags for a thread
* Bugfix where stopwords may not have worked properly
* Bugfix for vBSEO / main cloud not showing up

2006/09/xx - 1.0.5
* Unreleased dev build

2006/09/23 - 1.0.4
* Ability to add multiple tags via showthread.php
* Ability to exclude certain forums from utilizing tags
* Addition of custom hook for developers to change thread urls

2006/09/21 - 1.0.3
* Ability to add and remove tags from showthread.php
* Bugfix for older versions of mysql

2006/09/21 - 1.0.2
* Small bugfix

2006/09/20 - 1.0.1
* Showing tags list on showthread.php

2006/09/20 - 1.0.0
* Initial release

[Zoints]

Originally Posted by cellarius

Second: I really would like to see a possibility to see the tag cloud on forumhome (already proposed here, but not yet commented, as far as I can see). Even better would be a possibility to include a cloud in non-forum pages (with a smaller number of tags).

We are indeed looking into implementing such functionality

[perfphysio]

I would like a simple admin option to click to enable the font size to grow in relation to the number of tags, and another to turn this off and just display them all the same. It would be easiest to give this as an option in the standard admin for this hack

[greenflag]

i am getting lots of these emails with this in them:

Date : Sunday, October 29th 2006 @ 02:15:46 AM
Script : http://www.mysite.com/forums/tags/sea/6/
Referrer : http://www.mysite.com/forums/tags/sea/

like a few hundered per day - does he tag program cause this?

[buro9]

Love all of the additions DChapman, but I have a problem...

I've got 25,000+ existing threads and I don't think I can expect all of the thread owners to go back through them and tag them up.

If I open up the tagging of threads so that all registered users can do it, then they could remove tags that others had set.

You know what I'm going to ask for right?

Could you add in the next major revision the ability to allow all registered users to tag any thread.

Now, I know what you're thinking... it's not really set up for this, and it would be really messy. But it doesn't have to be.

If you created another table that stored the userid, threadid and a single tag, you could easily store user level tags per thread. Then, every time they get updated you could select the distinct tags per thread and update the existing table with the top 5 tags to display.

When a thread was created it would insert into the new table as well as the old.

And searches would of course go against the new table, with a join to the old.

Aren't I lovely? Look, I thought about it, and now I've gone and given you a great feature to add (Yeah, I'm a pain in the arse and really should code it myself )

[StarBuG]

Why don't you use "Automatically Tag Old Threads" ?

This is exactly for the situation you are in

Refine your filter list if you want to get better results

StarBuG

[buro9]

I did that

But an example would be a thread entitled:
"Lambchop playing at the Barbican! OMFG!!! Ponies!!"

Really I want that tagged as 'gig', 'tour' as well as 'lambchop' and ideally not 'ponies'.

People are good at classifying, they like it because it helps improve their lives as they find stuff easier for such little investment. So all I'm saying is that for forums with legacy content (who here doesn't have old threads?) that people doing the tagging will be far better than code doing the tagging. And for people being able to tag historical stuff when events change, that's even better.

[buro9]

BTW, Anyone who chooses to do the manual template edits (as I did*) and who has found that the navbar adjustments do not show... I found it easier to change the body of the "Zoints Thread Tags (automatic template edits)" plugin rather than disable it.

I changed it to:

if ($vbulletin->options['zointstags_on']) 
{
	//
	// navbar, always do this
	//
	eval('$zointstags_searchform = "' . fetch_template('zointstags_searchform') . '";');
	eval('$zointstags_tagslink = "' . fetch_template('zointstags_tagslink') . '";');
}

* The reason I did is that I'm using another hack to compress whitespace, and this prevents the pattern matching in the zoints plugin from finding the places to perform substitutions. So if you're using the compress templates hack, you'll need to manually insert the replacements.

[buro9]

Oh, and the forumdisplay-esque results page should be showing unread and read threads with the same consistency as the rest of the forum.


Although I'm pointing out lots of things, I should state that I *love* this hack. Just want it to be even better

[StarBuG]

Since the update my "Tags" Link in my navbar is gone.
I have a clean navbar template.

All changes on my templates are done by the Template Modification System on the fly.

So it should work.

StarBuG

[buro9]

Anyone using vbseo in conjunction with this hack, if you want to get all of your URL's seo'd when they are displayed, then the way to do this is to modify the type of URL.

In the templates threadbit and threadbit_pagelink you need to change all URL's that are to showthread.php and member.php to absolute and not relative.

So in my case as my forums are located here http://www.bowlie.com/forum/ the absolute url to showthread.php is /forum/showthread.php.

Adjust your URL's accordingly and VBSEO will recognise that these are local URL's the need to be seo'd.