vB 4.0 Suite - Separation of Forum and News, Articles, etc.

[convergent]

I am like many trying to evaluate how to proceed with an upgrade strategy for vBulletin 4.0. I have already bought the publishing suite for my forums, and plan to migrate to it quickly. I like the idea of shedding some of the poorly supported add-ons and hacks and getting to a more standard product that I can stay more current with going forward.

So one thing that I'm slowly uncovering is that with the publishing suite, all things will be in the same directory. Today I have vBadvanced for my portal, and so it is in my root directory, and the forums are in the /forums directory. Based on what I've seen, there will be three different .php files for the forum, blog, and cms. You can choose which you want to be index. OK, great, but then everything is in the /forums directory.

In the past, I've tried to get my news feeds accepted into Google News, and at the time my feeds were in the forum. Google rejected my submission because they wouldn't take forums as news. They insisted that anything they saw in a /forums directory would be rejected. That was quite a while ago, but I'm assuming this is still an issue.

Now to my point... I have vBSEO and trying to decide whether to stay with it or not. It seems I'd get clobbered with problems if I tried to remove it, because all internal and external links to my site would break.

But now I'm wondering if vBSEO will let me create virtual separation of the forum, blog, and CMS (news, articles, etc.)? It would seem that it could, but some things I've tried to do with vBSEO in the past were kind of tricky to implement. This would seem to be a natural default vBSEO function for vB 4.0 installations.

If its not the default, how hard would it be to do this? I guess at the simplest, you'd want to have your main CMS home page show up as the root index file. Then you'd want anything for the forum php file to go back to /forums and anything with the blog php file to go to /blog. Beyond that, I'm not sure how easy it would be to separate out the CMS urls into different virtual folders - /news, /articles, etc.

Thoughts on this?

[Juan Muriente]

Copied from: vB4 and vBSEO 3.5 Upcoming Release Notes

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I posted this in a new thread and was told to come here... the answer isn't here, so I'll ask it again. (that seems kind of an odd suggestion for an SEO company, since my question in the other thread would have been indexed and allowed other people to find that answer more easily in my opinion, but I'll do as told... vB 4.0 Suite - Separation of Forum and News, Articles, etc. )

Good point. I will copy this response to the other thread so that others looking for it can find easily find it.

I am like many trying to evaluate how to proceed with an upgrade strategy for vBulletin 4.0. I have already bought the publishing suite for my forums, and plan to migrate to it quickly. I like the idea of shedding some of the poorly supported add-ons and hacks and getting to a more standard product that I can stay more current with going forward.

That's good news, you are in the right place then

So one thing that I'm slowly uncovering is that with the publishing suite, all things will be in the same directory. Today I have vBadvanced for my portal, and so it is in my root directory, and the forums are in the /forums directory. Based on what I've seen, there will be three different .php files for the forum, blog, and cms. You can choose which you want to be index. OK, great, but then everything is in the /forums directory.

I think this statement is not entirely accurate. As far as I know, you will be able to name your forum and cms script anything you like. For example, index.php for the CMS and forum.php for the forum.

With vBSEO 3.5, our goal is to enable you to create virtual directories in a hierarchic fashion that will hold the content relevant to each section. At the moment, we are engineering this specific aspect of the system as the specifics greatly depend on the final structure that ships with vB4, and aspects of it have changed in the recent iterations.

In the past, I've tried to get my news feeds accepted into Google News, and at the time my feeds were in the forum. Google rejected my submission because they wouldn't take forums as news. They insisted that anything they saw in a /forums directory would be rejected. That was quite a while ago, but I'm assuming this is still an issue.

Not sure about it, but I would hope that Google has matured beyond directory names when deciding what's the nature of the content within. In any case, it's always best to take the safest route.

This would seem to be a natural default vBSEO function for vB 4.0 installations. (Would be great if vBSEO 3.5 by default took the blog and cms and created /blog and /cms virtual directory urls, or at least made it an option)

That is definitely our goal, and we already have mechanisms to achieve it. The key is, as you say, to make it as easy as possible for users to implement it without technical difficulties. That's precisely the piece of vBSEO 3.5 that we are working on at the moment.

If its not the default, how hard would it be to do this? I guess at the simplest, you'd want to have your main CMS home page show up as the root index file. Then you'd want anything for the forum php file to go back to /forums and anything with the blog php file to go to /blog. Beyond that, I'm not sure how easy it would be to separate out the CMS urls into different virtual folders - /news, /articles, etc.

Yes, that's an ideal virtual structure. We already achieve this with forums and subforums, and will try to make it as flexible as possible for users looking to create their own virtual structures. In any case, it's definitely on our plate, we know the need to have a sound, hierarchic and consistent architecture, and vBSEO will do all within its reach to make it available to you.

[Future]

Question sounds more like promotional techniques for vbseo.
If a forum itself thinks to be published in google news, then the member should definetly be a big-board image holder ?
or maybe, least cares about same.

But today, although technically sound enough to cope with a solution, plans to make a thread )

[CThiessen]

Hi,
I just wrote in the German part:
If possible i like to see that vBSEO offer 2 site maps.
One like it is now.

And a second site map for news , to choose in the APC Category's to be included.
This site map should meet the requirements of Google News.

Tx
Christian

[Mert Gökçeimam]

Hello Christian ,

We don't currently plan to produce two sitemaps, but I will bring this as a subject to Developer meetings so we can evaluate your suggestion. For the time being please feel free to submit this as a feature suggestion within vBSEO Sitemap Feature Suggestions