Briansol's Ultimate Guide to vBSEO

Good article, Thanks!

For those of us with existing forums which has users who already have special characters, how would we fix it so the rewrites work correctly? Also, if the forum is just part of our site and we have many, many other parts, won't the non-indexing of php, html etc. mess that up? And finally, if we decide to index php/html etc, will your rewrite rules still work? If not, then how would we fix it?

Sorry for so many questions!

If you have special characters in user names your options are:
1) use the ID in the rewrite (ie, /members/[user_name]-[user_id]/ )
2) re-name all 'bad' member names and email them all letting them know of their name change.

If you have other parts of your site with .php or .html extentions, then yes, you don't want to block them. The better choice would be to re-write those as well.
Yes, the re-write will still work, but the robots file won't. You will need to line-by-line disallow every junk script you don't want indexed. A search here for robots.txt should get you a basic list.

Thanks Brian!

Thanks for this Brian, it made my vbseo and sitemap instalation very easy.

One question, why have tags in the sitemap?

thanks for the brief explanations.

Originally Posted by steveneff

Thanks for this Brian, it made my vbseo and sitemap instalation very easy.

One question, why have tags in the sitemap?

up to you. Most of my members DONT use the tag system, so i have very few, but specific, tags available.

if yours are full of useless spam, i would not include them

Why would we select NO to "Include Social Groups Pages" in the sitemap ?

Originally Posted by briansol

up to you. Most of my members DONT use the tag system, so i have very few, but specific, tags available.

if yours are full of useless spam, i would not include them

Another good reason not to include tags in the sitemap is that it causes my sitemap creation to time out each night. I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get it to run and once I disable that feature it startd working like a charm.

Originally Posted by abrecher

Why would we select NO to "Include Social Groups Pages" in the sitemap ?

I think they are worthless pages. Your site may be different, but on my site, the social groups are little more than a waste of space.

Originally Posted by abrecher

Another good reason not to include tags in the sitemap is that it causes my sitemap creation to time out each night. I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get it to run and once I disable that feature it startd working like a charm.

yup, if you have a lot of tags it will take a long time to generate and ultimately take away from your thread pages bot time.

Hallo Brian

First i will thank you for this guide It rally rocks! After i use this guide i get a high google raking! So thanks for this.

Can i use you this guide with VBSEO 3.3.0 RC1??? Or will you need to update you guide / settings / "vbseo_all.xml" ????

And is there some settings i have to change in vBSEO Sitemap Settings in the new version 2.5.

Thanks

\\ Thomas

this has NOT been updated for 3.3.0 yet (nor the new sitemap). however, if you had this installed on 3.2 and then updated to 3.3, chances are the settings that weren't set were left on the default choice. So, it IS compatible, but it's not 100% up to date for the new stuff like the social groups and so forth.

I haven't updated my boards to 3.8 yet, let alone the latest vbseo rc, so i'm a little behind.

If I use these setting on my forum and I change a category or forum name should I use slugs? Or does it matter with this?

since the ID doesn't change, there's no point to using slugs if you change the name, as the name isn't a part of the url at all.

Thats what I thought!! Thanks for the reply