Major Additions - DC SEO vB URL Rewrite

[high]Removed until further notice[/high]

[DC Seo vB URL Rewrite]

Information

• [high]vBulletin Version:[/high] 3.5.x
• [high]Author:[/high] Dean Clatworthy
• [high]Copyright:[/high] You may use this modification at your own risk. I cannot and will not be held responsible for any damage you may cause to your forums during installation or thereafter. You may not distribute this modification in whole or parts and anyone found doing so faces risk of prosecution. All my modifications are released at vBulletin.org and anyone found releasing them elsewhere also faces risk of prosecution. You may not translate this modification without my prior permission.
• [high]Donations:[/high] I release my modifications for free. If you wish to donate please contact me and I will give you my details. All donations are graciously appreciated.

What does this modification do?
This modification will allow you to automatically have more search engine friendly URLs in your vBulletin. A forum which would normally display as forumdisplay?f=1 will now appear as f1-forumtitle.html and the same with threads. Having keywords in your URL can be of an advantage in search-engine ranking.

Requirements:

• You must have mod_rewrite apache module enabled on your server. Contact your host for more information.
• This will not work well for non-english boards as it strips most non-alpha numeric characters. E.g. ? would be stripped on french boards etc

Installation

1/

Please read the readme.txt file included in the zip for details on how to install this modification.


Please Click Install!
If you installed this modifcation please click the install button. It'll help you keep up to date with future releases and important bugfixes, security updates.

[Dean C]

That will not work though calorie. That will do an internal redirect to the old URL. Therefore deeming the new URLs useless to the search engines.

[monstergamer]

Originally Posted by lierduh

I could well be blind. A quick check shows the hack does not provide
301 redirect for the old urls. This is actually quite dangerous, at
least for Google. Google has been putting a lot of web sites on
duplicate contents penalty. If Google discovers two urls serve the
same page, the site/pages will be penalized. A classic example is
'www.site.com' and 'site.com' serve the same contents. There are many
PR5 or higher (page rank) sites become PR0 due to the penalty. It is
reported that these sites are penalized for at least 6 months before
they reappear in the index at the right position.

A few signs of sites being penalized:

1) Do a search for "forums.yoursite.com" (include the double quotes),
if the site is not returned first, bad luck.
2) Search for
site:forums.yoursite.com

If the result returns with a lot of URLs only without description, or
if a lot of your pages are listed in the Supplementary Index. Some sort of
penalty is in place.

A Google recommended way to create new URLs is to serve 301 header for
the old URLs. 301 means permanent redirect. So Google does not need to cache both
URLs. 301 can be easily implemented using .htaccess file.

i did not think of that...OMG
is there any way we can fix that ASAP

[lierduh]

Originally Posted by Dean C

Off the top of my head, I can't think of an easy way to redirect the old URLs to the new ones. This method uses .htaccess to redirect the new URLs and spoof the content of the old one.

Without reading the dry apache manual, I don't know an easy way on top of my head either.

You can also do it at script level, eg.:

Add an additional parameter to the Rewriterules for the URLs matched. eg.

RewriteRule ^f([0-9]+)-([A-Za-z0-9\-]+)\.html$ forumdisplay.php?f=$1&seourl=1 [L]

This way the new url will provide $_GET['seourl'] == 1 to the script.

If !isset ($_GET['seourl']), then

header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://site/new_seo_url");

[twin]

I have some problems in rewriting url for list of threads, it is template problem. I checked default style and all works fine. So my question is what template should I edit to make some changes in the list of threads page.

Example of list of threads https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/forumdisplay.php?f=111
Sorry for bad english

[lierduh]

Originally Posted by Dean C

Off the top of my head, I can't think of an easy way to redirect the old URLs to the new ones. This method uses .htaccess to redirect the new URLs and spoof the content of the old one.

Ok, remember something now.

You can use RewriteCond ^{QUERY_STRING}$ to catch the query_strings following by a RewriteRule.

[Aros]

Will this hack be usable for the new release RC1?

[onkelchen]

Originally Posted by Dean C

Updated to v1.2:

Fixed a bug with stickies showing up as the normal URL.

... but still buggy.

Great work so far, but there are some minor problems:

First, the stickies aren't completely rewritten. Once a sticky-thread reaches page 2, the links to these pages aren't being rewritten and are shown in the normal view. The first page is still fine.

Same problem on the thread view. First page is fine, but links to following pages aren't rewritten.

Not seriously necessary, but announcements and member profiles should be rewritten too.

[smashingyoungma]

So far as RC1 goes, it works fine on my board. Upgraded from beta 4, and didn't need to reinstall it or anything.

[Sovereign]

Can this work with the .htaccess included in amykhar's Userpage hack?

[Tigga]

Thanks for this Dean.