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 Calibre_k

is this hard to install? will be okay on vb 3.6.4?

It's easy (and we're here to help of you have problems). And all reports say it is fine with 3.6.4.

[Zoints]

Originally Posted by SaN-DeeP

thanks for the handy tip, are you planning to release a new version with some added/new features in near future ?
If so, please share the list of new features you have in mind and a timeframe.

Yes, we are working on a new version as I type this. I don't have a specific ETA (because I am very bad at them )

Originally Posted by SaN-DeeP

[high]* SaN-DeeP nominates this hack for best hack of month award.[/high]

Thanks!

[SaN-DeeP]

DchapMan, this modification definetly rocks, something I had been looking on for since ages.

Few suggestions and problems:
1. Automatic Tag Generator Scipt: zointstags.php
StopWords Options
unable to add numeric values like 1, 2, 3 to this list.

If there are some tags with value 1, 2, 3 search results are not displayed ?

2. A possible to way to fetch random tags from database everytime users browse tags maincloud or forumdisplay pages. (another better option for SEO)

3. Any Category (without any postings) which holds a group of forums does not shows any tags. (I will recommend adding tags to this place as well)

4. How can i add an inlinemod to search results ?

5. I need to edit some results from search results, (remove last post columns)

6. Who is Online (WOL) display

[aacircle]

Tags are a good idea HOWEVER just 1 problem. Many members post without considering what's best for search engines. Photopost has a similar feature, but very few members will actually take time to place proper tags.

[SaN-DeeP]

You can use stop keywords to ignore vague/common list of tags
however, my personal experience with photopost keywords is worst, it takes into consideration even description
I have reported this over photopost forums but seems no luck fixing the same yet !

[serhat_kk]

Originally Posted by KingPin6

thankyou for your reply, I disabled vbseo in the plugins/products section and it didnt help...

actually i got an answer here and not there (for another zpints related addon) sooo I replied here.

First of all thanks for this great work!

I have the same trouble with kingpin6. VBseo runnin at my site... And im getting blank white page when i enable zoints thread tags... How do i fix it?

thanks...

[Make Money?]

Originally Posted by aacircle

Tags are a good idea HOWEVER just 1 problem. Many members post without considering what's best for search engines. Photopost has a similar feature, but very few members will actually take time to place proper tags.

Thats why I want my forums tags to be moderator only. I would also like to nominate trusted member voulenteers with 'tagging permission' - to go tagging older threads.. My forum is a technical / tips forum - so some control is a good idea lest the inexperienced newbies ruin things...

[Make Money?]

I have an idea for a feature (please)

"Top 10 tag" lists / or moderator defined tag lists (per forum)

These could be a list defined by each individual forms moderators or site admin.. acting like a 'please look here first' area, a 'best of' area or a 'get a feel for the vibe of this forums direction' area.

It would be cool if the list was clearly prominent, proudly displayed. Perhaps as a SIDE BAR.

This would help moderators provide instant information resources that they feel their forum visitors might need...or perhaps should have a look at before posting..

Regular tag clouds and regular searching would of course also be possible, as usual..

[Zoints]

We're working on a new build and I thought I would share a screenshot for those of you who were having issues with special characters. We still have a lot of work to do, but are making progress:

[innosonic]

GREAT plugin, but could get some additional features.
Some ideas, maybe not all of them thought till end.

1)

Right now I show 100 tags per page. I show only one page, with A till Z, because even astro and zero can belong together in seo aspects.

These are rather too less than too many in the main tags index found in the navbar.

I would prefer to have only 30 in special forums, but 300 in the main index, just a different number, because of the design, 100 tags look like too many in subforums.

2) size of tag words.

In the main tag index the size is different depending on how often a tag is used. This looks great !

But in special forums they have all the same size. It would be perfect to have different sizes optionally even on top of threads, but at least in special forums. This might be less important than 1).

3) Character replacement, known bug and feature request.

This doesn?t work if I add new tags to an existing thread manually. One special German letter is transformed to four or five very special "nonsense letters".

In other cases it works - ? becomes ae like wanted, when I automatically create tags out of old threads, then it works, and also when I create new threads and add tags before sending/saving, then it works, too.

I guess this the best solution to have URLs.

But if this is possible, with unicode or however you coders do it, it would be perfect to really use it only as URL replacement function, and still to show the native letters in tags in the forums.

In German it?s not a very big issue, just a design question, because German has only few extra letters and people are used to see them like ae or oe in URLs, (Still, ? and ? look much better for German eyes in forums), but in French or even in Russian it becomes possibly rather unreadable, even though I already saw Russian in Latin letters. :-)