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]

Thanks Buro9, I appreciate it

[cellarius]

Originally Posted by DChapman

We are indeed looking into implementing such functionality

Great! Thank you!

[StarBuG]

How is the fix for the character replacement bug progressing?

[buro9]

It seems I can add rows to the zoints_tag table and it just works. Which is great.

So... how about we add a userid column to the zoints_tag table?

Once we do that, we offer a maintenance tool that sets the historical data so that the userid is the one who started the thread the tag is assigned to.

What do we get from creating this column?

• Personal tag clouds in our member profile page showing what tags I have tagged, or you have tagged.
• Everyone can tag everything without restriction
• Ability to generate stats to show who has tagged the most

So we can make tagging more powerful by allowing anyone to tag anything, as well as making it a personal thing as people get their own tag clouds, and we get to incentivise those who tag by showing that they're doing it.

What do you think?

[kafi]

Is it possible to search for thread by more than one tag simmultaneously?

[Zoints]

Originally Posted by StarBuG

How is the fix for the character replacement bug progressing?

That will be fixed in the next build. I don't have a date we expect that to be released, sorry.

Originally Posted by buro9

What do you think?

I like your way of thinking I bet you like what we come out with next

Originally Posted by kafi

Is it possible to search for thread by more than one tag simmultaneously?

Not at this time. But we'll explore the feasibility of that as I can certainly see the usefulness.

[buro9]

Originally Posted by DChapman

I like your way of thinking I bet you like what we come out with next

The ability to set default tags on a per forum basis? So that when you start a thread in a forum about "Gigs in London" the thread automatically gets given the tags "gigs, london" based upon a per forum setting within the Forum Manager of the AdminCp?

Was that even close?

[buro9]

Originally Posted by DChapman

Not at this time. But we'll explore the feasibility of that as I can certainly see the usefulness.

You could allow people to search for tags by inputting comma delimited searches, splitting on the comma and adding additional where clauses according to the number of parts.

Very feasible, and easy.

The URL would probably have to allow additional folder seperation though so a search for "gigs, london" would result in a URL of "/forum/tags/gigs/london/" for the results.

I need to stop giving scope creeping this hack!

[Thinkinstein]

Can I disable guests from clicking tags in threads? coz it might add extra burden to the server when there are lots of ppl clicking them.

[buro9]

Have you checked whether it adds load?

I don't think it does. The SQL side of things is pretty lean (though adding an index on the 'tag' column of the zoints_tags table will help fractionally), there are only 17 queries on my tag pages, a standard forum page has 15. And an explain of the page shows that the SQL is taking less time to run than that on a standard forum listing.

There is a lot more work in the PHP though, possibly room for optimisation there. But it's fractional and you'd gain very little for a lot of effort.

For an idea of this:
A standard forum display page:
Page generated in 0.25203 seconds with 15 queries
A zoints tag page:
Page generated in 0.21700 seconds with 17 queries

Ignore the minor difference... the point is that the load is almost identical in terms of processing time, and the SQL doesn't tax the server at all.

You certainly could exclude guests from viewing tags, but I cannot think of a benefit from doing so. You'd also be preventing Google spiders from seeing the tags, and frankly the potential for tagging to improve your Page Rank is pretty good, because they provide more context to the threads and a URL in which the context is present.

Yes it's possible, but seriously think about why you would want to do it when performance isn't a strong argument to use.