vBulletin Google Site Map

There are a few vBulletin Google Site maps around, but none as comprehensive as this that I have seen. This vBulletin Google site map is based on Kalius's work on discussed on his site and at Digitalpoint

FYI, the vBulletin Google Site Map modification contains at least one potential remote file include exploit. You are hereby notified that you should uninstall this modification, including the removal of the vBulletin Google Site Map PHP files from your server. The author of the modification has been notified, and the vBulletin Google Site Map thread has been moved to the Modification Graveyard forum.

Best,
vBorg Staff

vBulletin Google site map
with ability to add extra urls
(c) by T2DMan - Michael Brandon

8Nov05+13hrsGMT - update. Added support for Yahoo Sitemap & bug fix
7Nov05+13hrsGMT - update. Thanks for your help.

I have attached 1 version with 2 different preset configs for your convenience. vBSEO and non vBSEO configs.

Configure in the vbgsitemap-config.php file.
$base=""; // "" if in root, $base="forum/"; //if in the subdirectory forum

It now works well with forum permissions, and the vBulletin's scheduled task system. I have personally installed the reviewed vBGSiteMap on a site with over 200,000 urls. Copes with the large number of urls with no problems.

The vBGSiteMap works well with vbSEO, and it lists all the old url's to allow Google to spider the old url's and so find the 301 redirects to the new, and so delete the old url's from its index.

Compared to the previous versions

• Sitemap files now written into their own directory - means this can be safely chmod 777 - thanks Sarah King
• config and class files separated out
• new help file written
• many corrections made to the code - amazing what sitting on a piece of code can do, and amazing what you can learn from personally installing on many different servers.
• Can now work on mysql versions from 3.23.58 to 5+
  

Specifications

• works with v3.03 - 3.5
• access to this file is password protected

the same password as the database via the vBulletin includes/config.php file

• creates an index file and multiple gzipped site maps to less than the maximum permitted by Google (I have in fact restricted it to 3k url's, rather than 50k as my browser takes a while to process the file when checking it)
• creates a gzipped file containing the urls for Yahoo Sitemap

• the site map files are created in the /vbgsitemap/files directory which needs to be chmod to 777

adds

• forums - with paginations of forums (excluding redirects and password protected forums)
• threads - with pagination of threads (excluding invisible threads=soft deleted, and threads inside password protected forums)
• archive forum pages with paginations
• archive versions of threads with paginations
• members

extra

• extra urls from other program types
• add a new url per line onto file.txt, and a gzipped file will be created for it, and added to the site index file.

How to install

• unzip the files
• copy the vbgsitemap folder to your root directory
• chmod the vbgsitemap/files directory to 777
• copy vbgsitemap.php to your root directory
• copy the includes/cron/vbgsitemap-cron.php file to your vbulletin includes/cron/ directory
• look over the configuration options on the /vbgsitemap/vbgsitemap-config.php file
  • $base="" or "forum/" - if your forum is the actual root, or in the forum directory etc.
  • $addthreadarchive=false; - whether you want the archive version of the threads to be added or not.
  • the rest should not need to be changed
  • change to $xtrafile="file.txt"; if you have additional urls that you want included from another package, get a list of those url's and add them to file.txt.
• Then access the /vbgsitemap/index.php file in your browser to get things happening.
• The username/password is the username/password of your database.
• Add the resulting one index file to Google sitemaps: http://www.yourdomain.com/vbgsitemap.php
• Add the other file to Yahoo sitemaps
  http://www.yourdomain.com/vbgsitemap/files/urllist.gz
• A cron job can be setup in the vbulletin scheduled tasks
  
  
  • ./includes/cron/vbgsitemap-cron.php
  • depending on the number of posts/new threads to your forum, set to run daily or weekly etc. The cron will automatically ping Google and return success/failure into the cron log.

[Xplorer4x4]

What exactly is it this hack does? Could you explain it for us not so advanced users? :-\

[T2DMan]

Originally Posted by Xplorer4x4

What exactly is it this hack does? Could you explain it for us not so advanced users? :-\

How about the following vBulletin Google Sitemap

Why have a Google Site Map vBulletin:

Basically - Google site maps for vBulletin are a great way of getting pages found faster, therefore anchor text being found faster, therefore pages being ranked higher faster, and Google PR being attributed to pages faster and better.

• With no use of the Google site map - just added heaps of new pages to a forum and very soon after Google found the main forum pages, yet to find all the threads
• Google often spiders based on the Google PR of the site - the higher PR, the more often, earlier and deeper it seems to spider.
• So if you are a low PR site, you can wait quite a few weeks for new content to be found by Google.
• And even if you are a higher PR site, you can still wait quite a number of days for Google to find all the new pages that have been added.
  
  

So Google site maps can get new pages found faster and it is less dependant on the Google PR of your site as to how fast those pages are found and spidered (IMO).

• Where Google ranks a page is a lot about Google PR and link text for that page. So once Google has found all those new pages - if those pages have a lot of link text/anchor text for certain important pages on your site, then those important pages will rank higher earlier.
• You need to make sure that you have some good links from existing high PR pages to those new pages, and good html site maps, so Google will calculate in good PR for those pages you have created.
• It is always one thing for a page to be cached by Google. It is quite something else for it to then be ranked high by Google.

So how about it - sounds like Google site maps are a good thing?

New version being tested at the moment... been a while. Sorry.

[T2DMan]

There are lots of url's on vbulletin and potential session id's and newpost/lastpost etc. Some spider versions of google sitemaps only show the url, not the ultimate 301'ed url.

There are a defined number of actual threads and forums etc that you actually want to search engines to cache and return on the SERP's.

So having a specific program that returns the correct url's based on an analysis of the database is a very clean way of doing things.

[Xplorer4x4]

So bassicly I run a chance of Google canceling my AdSence service for using a hack to increase my rankings?

[T2DMan]

woooo.Where did that come from???

Adwords promote linking schemes!

But vbseo url rewrites have nothing to do with that. And a Google site map has nothing to do with that.

The link vault is the only possible issue - totally separate scheme. Its Google that is not keen on linking schemes for linking purposes - nothing to do with adsense - they keep rather separate.

[David_R]

i submitted my map to google 2 weeks ago, should i rebuild everything again (new threads from last 2 weeks and submit again) ?
what should be done now.

sorry for lame question

[KarateKid]

Originally Posted by David_R

i submitted my map to google 2 weeks ago, should i rebuild everything again (new threads from last 2 weeks and submit again) ?
what should be done now.

sorry for lame question

is there a new version coming, which also includes the vbseo functionality?

Regards,

Sebastian

[krohnathlonman]

I actually only put the archive threads in the sitemap I use that other hack to forward all the spiders to my archive pages.

I then have ads and stuff on my archive pages....

Also I get that time error on every one of my sitemaps but I also have alot of big forums.....

[ManagerJosh]

Poorly written instructions to install....I'm having enormous difficulty installing.

[ukbill69]

Same here, very poor instrustions, uninstalling now, login not working, dont know what the hell it asks for the database user and pass, becuase thats within the config.php

require $base.'includes/config.php';