Briansol's Ultimate Guide to vBSEO

afaik, honda-tech.com isn't related to the author of this message.

about the other site, no, it's setup different than the listed example at the first post of this thread.

Originally Posted by fattony69

So, I don't think this is exactly what you use anymore by the looks of hondaswap's links and my sites.

Yeah, I actually don't understand why he said to do it this way and on his site he has it a completely different way haha

Either way, I am using this and haven't had an issue with it.

I would just caution anyone that is thinking about using this method though that he is no longer around and he won't be updating this anymore. Even to 3.8. It works fine on 3.8 the way it is, but the sitemap portion could use an update.

Actually, now he's edited his post, it's pretty much understandable. But still, no. As it looks like this site is using a customized version of 'option one'.

Still, all tutorials listed, and the directory structure used, are most definitely more than interesting, and well suited withing the vBSEO installation files.

However, when noticing Google's current directory structure, I'm kind looking at the open directory structure, if that's even a phrase (google/news instead of google/news/) as well.

I've had Briansol's 'ultimate guide' settings in place for a few days now and after a heavy robot day yesterday I wanted to check with those familiar with the ultimate guide settings that the crawl errors I'm seeing are normal.

Am I correct in thinking that all urls regardless of where they point to on my forum (p for post, t for thread) will eventually be picked up by the robots and will replace the urls which look like this: .../forumdisplay.php?f=17

To a novice (me) it appears that the new heirachical folders produced by Briansol's xml are being blocked and hence will never be indexed...

anyone?

It could well be these are already indexed URLs (meaning before you last updated your vBSEO settings)

Best thing to do is compare the date between your last update and these errors.

Ah good. That puts my mind a little more at rest. The robots will be picking up my new robots.txt in just under 4 hours and I'd really like this to be the last time I change it. My sitemap contains showthread and forumdisplay only so would it be okay to add the lines:

Disallow: /forum/*.php
Disallow: /forum/*.html
Disallow: /forum/*.htm


and just let the bots slowly go over to permalinks over the next months?

It is my opinion that you do NOT need to block php, html, or htm files. They don't exist now, so their is no need to block them. What it does seem to do however, is slow down the re-index process since google doesn't seem to be able to access those pages to get the 404 errors.

If you want to block a specific file, then do, but otherwise, I'd suggest leaving the wildcard block off.

This is true. If you block php files *before* the re-indexing occurs, this can prevent the 301 redirects from occurring. Rather than updating the index, Googlebot would be forced to first drop them and then find them again. This would be a much less efficient process.

Thanks for your replies guys. Yes, what you report is what I saw and the end result was a total waste of almost a week of good robot activity so I decided to cut my losses yesterday and throw a little money at the problem and I'm finally back on track.

briansol, that's a amazing tread for everybody. I did your sitemap settings in my forum. But I have 2 errors in the google sitemap section:

Line 1900 and 66052

Invalid tag value
This XML tag contains an invalid value. Please correct and resubmit.

And I found these lines in the sitemap file:
1988<url>
<loc>http://www.mysite.com/catagory/index16.html</loc>
<priority>0.0153</priority>
<lastmod>2009-07-25T21:50:35+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
1993</url>

66050<url>
<loc>http://www.mysite.com/tags/</loc>
<priority></priority>
<lastmod>2009-07-25T23:00:27+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
66055</url>

And I also looked my vBSEO sitemap settings:

Priority Range - Forum Display: 0.6
Priority Range - Show Thread: 0.9
Priority Range - Tags: 0.5

What can I do in this situation ?

Thanks

I had the same issue, you need to reset your prioties as

aa.a - bb.b

I forget the reason, something about not updated yet

Thanks John,
That time should I update the settings of forumdisplay as 00.6 or ??
I confused

Originally Posted by Cagatayh

Thanks John,
That time should I update the settings of forumdisplay as 00.6 or ??
I confused

I set all my priorities to default, Until Brian Updates his guide

I do not think Brian will be updating his guide. However, as an alternative, you can add a small range around the numbers he had set.