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!

[veedee]

Originally posted by Overgrow
p.s. Funny google gif! I thought you were going to show us how your board was somehow listed already.

No mate, i have too much free and time i like to have a laugh

I will install this hack when i

a) learn to do it
b) stop pissing about

good luck in your future hacks

[limey]

this is an incredible hack...thank you shabang!

[Overgrow]

I know the formatting looks really plain but it is really simple to customize. At the bottom of the script, look for

function HTMLHeader() {

and in there you will see normal HTML. Edit it with colors, a style sheet for fonts, etc, however you want. If you look through the script you will find loops that print out normal HTML if you want to change the background color of rows, etc...

It's intended to create simple doorway pages that will rank very high on search engines-- hence the way it dynamically pulls post title into the metas (one reason phpbuilder's pages rank so high). The pages have very little text before the meat of the content for high keyword prominence.

Be sure to add your main site keywords into the options at the top for better ranking overall. Somehow I expect some of my forum posts to rank higher than my normal site because of the search-engine-friendliness of the pages and the number of times keywords are repeated in long threads.

[gmtalk]

Overgrow. You asked if anyone was having the reload error.

I like the concept of this hack and have installed it on my server. I get the list of the forums. The private forums are hidden and all. When I click one of the listings I get the listing page over again.

Any suggestions?

http://discussions.gmforums.com/archive

TIA for any help

John

[gmtalk]

Got it. Nevermind my last post. I figured it out and it is working very well.

MAN! I'd LOVE to make this hack work

Fatal error: Call to unsupported or undefined function htmlheader() in /home/name/dir/forums3/archive/index.php on line 80

anybody had any luck with this?

[Overgrow]

Two options:

1) I continue back-porting this hack to PHP3.

2) You get your host to upgrade to PHP4.

In the ideal world, #2 is the correct choice It will help with any other hacks you try and install plus everything, including your VB, will run faster.

Problem is is a dedicated server... it's all up to me, which is unfortunate, big time newbie when it comes to installing new software, packages and the like.

I don't hold much hope for the NOS to do it for me. Patience I guess.

[limey]

Use this and skip the frontpage extensions instructions.
http://www.linuxnewbie.org/nhf/intel...ng/a_m_f1.html

Thanks for the link! Good stuff.
I'm wondering about RedHat and "packages" ... will have to look into it, but it seems that it's a matter of uploading a php "package" and executing it. Just begining to read up.

Thanks for the input.