Board Optimization - Canonical URLs For CLogic SEO

Canonical URLs for CLogic SEO
Released By - Binary Basketball Forums

I have written a plug-in for vBulletin that will add a canonical link for vBulletin forums using CLogic SEO. Currently, the aim of CLogic SEO is to provide a simple SEO solution for re-writing URLs which is good because the previous project (Zoints) had plenty of issues.

The Problem
While CLogic does a fantastic job writing URLs, it writes plenty of them. It's not CLogic's fault, or vBulletin's fault. Different threads can be accessed in different ways. If you are viewing a thread and you go to the new post you would either notice &goto=newpost somewhere in your URL. Unfortunately, while that's handy for users, it provides another URL for Google to see that has the same content. Google doesn't know which one to index or sees it as spam pages which devalues your ranking in search engines.

The Solution
Google, Yahoo, and those other guys all agreed to follow a standard to help them rank people. That they created the standard of using a link tag with the rel="canonical" attribute to tell search engines which URL is the URL that should be ranked.

Blog platforms already do this and some forums have started to do this as well. Unfortunately it hasn't caught on to everybody. While SEOvB Link Canonicalization is a great plugin, it doesn't work with the CLogic re-written URL's.

Requirements
You must have C-Logic SEO installed and using it to re-write your URLs in order for this mod to work at this time. For the next release I plan to add more functionality to this mod. For now, DO NOT use this mod if you do not have C-Logic installed AND using it to rewrite your URLs or it.

Install Instructions
Upload attached product-bbcanonical.xml file to your vBulletin forums using the built in product manager

For a demo, you can check out Link Canonicalization for CLogic SEO in action by viewing the source of that page. Notice the URL ends with arguments but the code inserted into the header is

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.binarybasketball.com/forums/canonical-url-for-clogic-seo-t9553.html" />

This is my first hack for vBulletin but now that CLogic has resurrected a decent SEO program, I plan to release more SEO vBulletin hacks for those either unwilling or unable to pay for vBSEO.

Please mark installed to support this mod.

*Added dependencies to 1.1 (thanks NLP-er)

*Update to version 1.1
URL for page# > 1 points to the right direction

[binaryg]

reserved

[Arcade Fire]

PHP Code:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function cseo_url_thread() in /home/********/public_html/beta/global.php(400) : eval()'d code on line 1 


[binaryg]

Do you have C-Logic SEO installed?

[mabersoft]

Great, gona try it out.

Installed.

[jaredwilli]

doesnt work

Fatal error: Call to undefined function cseo_url_thread() in /*************/forums/global.php(400) : eval()'d code on line 68

[binaryg]

At the moment, this only works for forums with C-Logic SEO re-written URLs

Do you have that installed?

[BlueNinjaGo]

Suggestion: Create a "Requirements" section in the first post.

[binaryg]

Thank you, added

[NLP-er]

Originally Posted by binaryg

At the moment, this only works for forums with C-Logic SEO re-written URLs

Do you have that installed?

It is possible to describe in product file dependencies - so if someone will not have C-Logic SEO he will not be able to install your mod (just get appropriate info that he needs mod C-Logic SEO).

Use just after tag <versioncheckurl>:

<dependencies>
	<dependency dependencytype="product" parentproductid="SET_ID_OF_C_LOGIC_SOE" minversion="SET_MIN_C_LOGIC_SEO_VERSION" maxversion="" />
</dependencies>

And your problems will gone