James

Nothing new? I believe all these options are already in vBSEO.

sounds really nice, seems I'll have to decide whether to use mod rewrite, and having options to not use it is nice.

extraneous information (such as "Page x") have now been removed.

Uh? So you mean the thread title for a multi-page thread will always be the same?
That is a really bad idea! Users will get errors about duplicate titles in Google Webmaster Tools - which should be a clear sign that this is a no-go.

Duplicate content reduced - by altering the operation of the showpost.php file to redirect cleanly to showthread.php.

Hmm, this effectively means that the 'View Single Post'-feature will be removed?
If so, I am not 100% happy about that, I found it to be e pretty useful feature.

Thanks for your efforts, but the URLs rewriting provides a few options, and I'm sorry I will not use it if it keeps the same useless approach, I mean 4 patterns only!

I've already used vBSEO to rewrite my URLs, my current rewrite rules don't exist in your approach (topic[threadid].html) as I don't use the thread title because it's going to be ugly for my language, that means I have to change my URLs again If I want to use your rewrite feature!

I feel sorry if you don't take my feedback seriously, as the current approach has now use for me or for any other Arabic admin!

Then what should I do?

I hope the system is expendable at least so I can add my own approach

Regards

Originally Posted by Mazinger

Nothing new? I believe all these options are already in vBSEO.

Yes but without paying additional fees on top of what I already pay now, plus the entirety of my board would still be officially supported (not that it is currently either way it goes, but just an example ).

Anyway, looking forward to vBulletin 4 James. vB4 is looking up.

For the showpost.php cancellation, it's strange thing too!

I really can't get you! you want to remove this, but what about the duplicated content like:

- http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=243372 (the main URL)
- http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showt...hreadid=243372 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! that's too much
- http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showt...16#post1422516
- http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showt...18#post1422518
- http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showt...44#post1422544
- http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showt...49#post1422549
- http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showt...45#post1422945

The showpost.php?p= is not a problem at all in compare with showthread.php?p=

For more please read this Duplicated content in vBulletin - Is a real problem

My comments as follows. Some are good, some are bad, but here goes:

Keyword Use in Title Tag

To one extent, that's good news, to one, bad news. You still need some way of differentiating the thread titles each page, but removing some useless information in many page titles can only be a good thing.

NOFOLLOW tag

Needs to be optional, but no problems with this that I can see. Maybe even make allowance of dofollow links per usergroup in the future, that would allow for this function to pretty much wipe out the SEO effect of spammers and advertisers.

Duplicate content reduced

Sounds good.

Meta description and keywords

Sounds good.

Friendly URL options

My opinion is varied. I'll go over each option as I see it, starting from standard all the way to mod rewrite:

Standard URLs

Good for old vBulletin sites and those with decent search engine ranking that fear a URL change could be damaging.

Basic Friendly URLs

Don't see the use here. The later options are far better in every way.

Advanced Friendly URLs

Interesting, basically Mediawiki type defaults, correct? I swear I've seen this kind of layout a bit before, but nothing I'd want to use.

Mod Rewrite Friendly URLs

Nice. Members and forums option is fine, threads... not so much. It would be VERY nice if the option to have [forumname]/[threadname] was in, although from personal experience, this may be somewhat challenging to do (I tried it before, it often failed to work right with multiple levels of 'folders' in the URL or whatever).

Search Engine Sitemap

Excellent news! Pretty much completely did what was asked for this kind of feature and thanks to this, that's one less modification to maintain.

James, will 301 redirects be put in place so that if anybody changes any of the URL options, that the standard will be 301'ed to the new URL and, vice versa, if somebody turns off the rewritten URLs that the friendly URLs will be 301'ed back to the standard?

If you're already using vBSEO, than there is no really need for this option. However, for the basic rewriting it's all what you need and for everything that goes beyond, use vBSEO.

Hello, I have some suggestions for XML Sitemap. Please have a look
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=294045

And the special characters substitution? Like ã, ç é and others very common in Romance Languages (Portuguese, French, Italian and so on?).

To really make a user friendly URL those chars must be substituted, not only encode

If you're already using vBSEO, than there is no really need for this option.

There is!
Build-in functions will always be a lot faster than heavy preg_replace() actions (like vBSEO does).

Originally Posted by Andreas

There is!
Build-in functions will always be a lot faster than heavy preg_replace() actions (like vBSEO does).

Fair enough.

Hmm, I'm not really happy with the "non technical" options. It's a bit like the AdSense integration: you can't tweak anything. And the massive amount of options is one of the good things about vBulletin.

I prefer a .html end for SEO URL's. It would be nice to give us some more control, for example like WordPress does. WordPress gives you the same "non technical" "preferred" options, but you also have a field where you can create whatever URL type you want.

I don't want keywords in URL's which is exactly why I will not be using it.

Will there be any "option settings" with the "nofollow" tag added to edternal url's? Because external links posted on your forum that lead to other sites pages that have a (high PR) rank in Google, should not use the "nofollow" tag on url's. Because it can help your sites PR if you link to other pages with a high PR also.

And should only really be used if your linking to other sites pages that have a (low PR).

Bit tricky though, and I can't see how this can be done. But just something to think about.

Read this article about it: http://searchengineland.com/sculptin...o-impact-12982

Originally Posted by MRGTB

Will there be any option with the "nofollow" tag? Because external links posted on your forum that lead to other sites that have a (high PR) rank in Google should not use the "nofollow" tag on URLS's.

And should only really be used if your linking to other sites that have a (low PR).

Or have the option to limit this to signature links (which are mostly irrelevant). Links in posts should be relevant to the content. It's the moderator's task to look after that.

In Mod Rewrite Friendly URLs, can we translate "threads" and "members " ?

Example :

translation_of_threads/1234-Thread-Title

Glad we are starting to hear about vB 4.0 .

Originally Posted by RS_Jelle

Or have the option to limit this to signature links (which are mostly irrelevant). Links in posts should be relevant to the content. It's the moderator's task to look after that.

But the problem is though, when a person post a link leading to another website in his thread. How do you know what the PR Rank of that page is though? Thats the problem, and you can't expect moderators to check the PR of every page a link leads to posted on your forum.

That's why there is no real solution to that problem, unless you only add it to signature links like you said. But then you still have the other problem, and also the problem of people posting links to their sites in threads.

The mind boggles!