Search Engine Indexer - vbHome (lite) add-on

This script will install the Search Engine Indexer Add-On for vbHome (lite).
What does it do? It makes all your forum URL's as search engine friendly.

For example, the URL:
forum/forumdisplay.php?forumid=9&daysprune=365&sortorder =&sortfield=lastpost&perpage=25&pagenumber=2
will look like:
forum/forumdisplay/f-9-p-2.html
That will allow any search engine to index properly all your forum contents, in no time.

ESTIMATED INSTALL TIME: 1 minute

NOTE
The script work ONLY with vbHL 4.x. It uses Apache's [high]ForceType[/high] directive. Most of Apache servers have it installed by default. Check with your host to make sure the module is installed.
If you use another server then Apache, the script will NOT work.

The only solution I found for IIS is the ISAPI Rewrite module.

Follow the readmefirst.htm instructions carefully.

[high]You have an old version?[/high]
Clear your browser temporary files, before you redownload the package.

[TECK]

I noticed that in some old PHP versions (ie. 4.0.6) the archive will not work.
The fix is really simple. In your forumdisplay and showthread (.txt) files, find:
$endbit = strrchr( $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] , '/' );
Replace it with:
$endbit = strrchr( $HTTP_SERVER_VARS['PHP_SELF'] , '/' );

That should take care of your problem.

Once you installed the script, the next important step is to submit properly your archives.php file to be indexed.
You should follow these guidelines to get listed in every major search engine:

DO NOT CHEAT
- do not use automatic search engine submitters, do it manually
- do not use 1 pixel images to link your archives file
- do not make invisible your link text, by masking it with the same background color
- do not use 1-4 pixels text at the top of your page, to display the site contents
- do not link your archives file to an image without using the [pre]alt=""[/pre] tag

GOOGLE FACTS
1. Google uses a crawler named Googlebot which crawls the web approximately every thirty days.
2. It is not necessary to submit any page to Google. If you do submit, submit only your most important page to this search engine.
3. Googlebot is a deep crawler and should crawl all of your pages.
4. Google supplies ranking results for placement in Netscape Search, the ODP, Anzwers, Yahoo! and Ilor.
5. Google can crawl pages in ASP, JSP, CFM, PHP, Excel, Microsoft Word, newsgroups, PDF and PostScript files, Power Point and Rich Text formats.
6. Google loves sites with a high number of legitimate, relevant incoming links.
7. Google hates spam.

GOOGLE TECH SUPPORT E-MAIL
If your site is new, or hasn't shown up in Google for long, it may because our "fresh crawl" (which runs each day) was finding your site instead of our main crawl (which runs about once a month). Our "fresh crawl" is a newer feature, and we're still experimenting with which pages to crawl, how deeply to crawl, etc. We even reserve the right to (gasp!) not do a fresh crawl on some days because we're doing tests or reviewing new code. Someone wrote in recently and said "my site got in Google three weeks ago, and you've dropped me four times!" Nope, it's just that we don't always crawl the same pages in our fresh crawl, and we don't always crawl to the same depth. As we do a full crawl of the web, we find most of the sites from our fresh crawl and put them in our regular index. My advice on our fresh crawl is to view it as a nice "bonus" on top of Google's deep index. Users can always search our full index, but sometimes we can serve up even fresher pages as an extra nicety.

What does this mean for the average webmaster? In the word of the great Hitchhiker's Guide, "Don't Panic."
Just do the normal things you should do:
1. Create a great site.
2. Submit your site to Google on our "add url" form.
3. Get a link from the Open Directory Project or other directories (Yahoo, etc.).
4. Don't panic if your site takes a little while to show up in Google. Be patient, and start to look around the web--there's lots of great advice about improving your site for users and search engines.

Hope this helps,
xxxxxxxxxx

RECOMMENDED SEARCH ENGINES
1. Google - The largest and best index at the time.
Submit your link here.

2. Inktomi - This is the database that feeds iWon, 4anything, AOL Search, HotBot, GoTo, ICQ, LookSmart, MSN Search & Snap.
Submit your link here and here.

3. Fast / AllTheWeb - This Norwegian index is almost as good as Google.
Submit your link here.

4. AltaVista - Still one of the big guns, despite its temperamental ranking system.
Submit your link here.

5. Walhello - Mysterious new index with great results. Get listed, it is on its way up.
Submit your link here.

6. Non-English Indexes - The people of these countries use their own search engines a lot. Helps if your site is in their language, because they will be searching for keywords in their own language.
Caloweb France - Submit your link here.
Caloweb Germany - Submit your link here.
Caloweb Spain - Submit your link here.

Once you done all this, watch the incoming traffic that will arrive to your site.
Good luck.

[TECK]

Dead Engines
There is no point trying to submit to these search engines...

Excite - dead, now uses pay-per-click results
Direct Hit - will be retired shortly
Northern Light - no longer available to the general public
Lycos - now use AlltheWeb's index

[TECK]

To block the crawlers go to certain pages, upload the robots.txt file with onto your main root directory (not the forums).
Make sure you change the /forum folder to your actual folder name.

For more info on robots.txt file, go here.

[TECK]

To replace the "Guest" name with the actual crawler name, follow the instructions included in the file (20 seconds install).

[TECK]

Ok, another idea I came up with... If the crawler is goglebot.com, for example, and it's hitting the actual forum pages, not the archive, you could use this trick to remove the sessionhash from the templates (see attached files).

The list will take care of all major search engines.
Make sure you enter the actual ['HOST'] name ONLY.
To test it, enter for example:
'mozilla',

It will remove all your session hashes, if you browse with Internet Explorer for example.

[TECK]

The fix for [HIGH]online.php[/HIGH] file, to display nice links, is below.
There are 2 methods, the easy or the hard way.

If you want to use the main archive file with a .HTML extension, replace in vbHL [pre]global.php[/pre] this code:
$archiveurl . '/archive/
to:
$archiveurl . '/archive.html (present 2 times).
Then add onto your [high]htaccess.txt[/high] file:

<files archive.html>
  ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</files>

Rename your file to [high]archive.html[/high].

[TECK]

If you want to hotlink directly your forums and threads to the coresponding archive pages, do the following changes, listed below.
To test it, mouse over each forum or thread icon, while viewing our forums.

[PcFreak]

Great hack.

But the showthread function dont work for me.

If i click a link, I get them without the last letter of my domain name.

I get http://www.lilis-welt.d/showthread/t-245.html and not http://www.lilis-welt.de/showthread/t-245.html .

How can i fix this.

Sorry about my bad english.


The link of the archive is here: http://www.lilis-welt.de/archive.php

Thank you

PcFreak

[joor]

You should be using ForceType so using archive.php is a mistake. Make sure that you named the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess, notice this file has a .dot in front of it unlike the others. You may also need to restart apache.

Thanks Teck, working great, can't wait for vPublish, dying over here