vBSEO 3.1.0 Released!

Hi everyone,

vBSEO 3.1.0 is now officially a GOLD release, available to all vBSEO customers.

3.1.0 includes several important new additions including vBulletin Blog Compatibility, caching system compatibility, performance improvements and several other new features, updates, and bug fixes (60+ in total).

Prepare for the Next Generation of vBSEO
We consider 3.1.0 GOLD to be the pre-cursor to the next generation of vBSEO!

I know you are probably very interested to find out exactly what that means. Please allow me to explain.

Firstly, this release is very much a transitional release, taking us from one era to the next.

Now that we are in our 3rd year of business with vBSEO, with thousands of happy vBSEO users (like Ismael Briasco, founder of psicofxp forums), we feel it is time to take care of several outstanding requests that have been discussed in our community, including the following:

• Branding Removal Option
• Installation Service
• No More Encryption - Visible Source Code
• vBSEO Performance Boost
  
• vBSEO Roadmap

Branding Removal Option Available
On our purchase page, you will now see that we have a branding removal option.

Basically, those who select this option are permitted to remove the vBSEO copyright notice from their forums.

For those of you who require this feature, we are pleased to make it available to you now.

vBSEO has thousands of customers all over the world, speaking over 23 different languages! vBulletin forum admins all over the world are clearly aware that vBSEO is the right choice for their vBulletin SEO solution.

While we like to think of the vBSEO copyright as a "badge of honor" and hope that many of you choose to keep it in place, we respect your wishes to have a removal option available. Request granted.

vBSEO Branding Removal Option - Overview

Installation Service
While vBSEO is a straightforward installation, there are many forum admins who do not have a highly technical background.

We do not want anyone to miss out on taking advantage of vBSEO due to an inability to complete the installation.

With that said, we have added a new installation service to our purchase page.

If you need your installation completed professionally, you can select this option and a member of the vBSEO Total Support Team will take care of it on your behalf.

vBSEO Installation Service Option - Overview

vBSEO 3.1.0 - Encryption Free - Visible Source Code
vBSEO 3.1.0 is the first official release that is 100% visible source code and requires no IonCube/Zend encryption!

We hope to encourage greater interaction with the vBulletin development community. With more great minds, we are certain to accelerate the improvement of vBSEO for next generation versions. Stay tuned for an exciting upcoming announcement related to this aspect in the near future.

vBSEO Performance Boost
The encryption free version of 3.1.0 has been getting several reports from our pre-release team that we should expect a very significant performance boost from vBSEO 3.0.0.

While past versions of vBSEO are performance optimized, we have even greater expectations for 3.1.0 for large and highly active forums. In fact, we did beta testing with the new version for large forums. Results were extremely positive!

vBSEO Roadmap
Get a complete summary of recent events for vBSEO, as well as what is planned for vBSEO 3.5 and an exciting new announcement about vBulletin Blogs!

Buy vBSEO 3.1.0

Read on to find out more about what's included in vBSEO 3.1.0...

New Features in vBSEO 3.1.0:

(1) NEW FEATURE: vBulletin Blog URL Rewrites

vBSEO 3.1 includes a full vBulletin Blog Rewriting feature. Like all vBSEO URL Rewrites, we built this new feature to achieve full link consensus.

As is typical with vBSEO, it is also fully configurable.

vB Blog Rewriting can be configured by expanding the "Advanced Settings" area of "URL Rewrite Settings" in the vBSEO Control Panel (vbseocp.php).

In the "vBulletin Blog URLs" section, you'll have complete control over the configuration of your vBulletin Blog URLs.

Configurations include:

• Rewrite Blog URLs?
• Blog URL Format
• Blog Entry URL Format
• "Next Blog Entry" Redirect URL Format
• "Previous Blog Entry" Redirect URL Format
• Blog Category URL Format
• Blog Category URL Format (Pagination)
• Blog Attachments URL Format
• Blog Feed URL Format (Per User)
• Blog Feed URL Format (Global)
• "Blogs By Day" List URL Format (Per User)
• "Blogs By Day" List URL Format (Global)
• "Blogs By Day" List URL Format (Global, Pagination)
• "Blogs By Month" List URL Format (Per User)
• "Blogs By Month" List URL Format (Global)
• "Blogs By Month" List URL Format (Global, Pagination)
• "All Blog Entries" List URL Format (Index Page)
• "All Blog Entries" List URL Format (Pagination)
• "Recent Blog Entries" List URL Format (Index Page)
• "Recent Blog Entries" List URL Format (Pagination)
• "Best Blog Entries" List URL Format (Index Page)
• "Best Blog Entries" List URL Format (Pagination)
• "Best Blogs" List URL Format (Index Page)
• "Best Blogs" List URL Format (Pagination)
• "Blog Comments" List URL Format (Index Page)
• "Blog Comments" List URL Format (Pagination)

While these powerful features may seem a bit overwhelming, it should not be cause for concern. We have pre-configured them for you with default settings that match those in use right here at vbseo.com for our own vBulletin Blog setup.

Social Bookmarking features have also been updated for compatibility with the vBulletin Blog system.

Configuration options include:

• Display Social Bookmarking Icons for Blog Entries?
• Blog Social Bookmarking Icons Display Options:

Note: Enter a special code in your "blog_show_entry" template if you want to specify a different location for the social bookmarking icons. By default, bookmarking icons will appear at the bottom-left corner of each blog entrypost.



(2) NEW FEATURE: Caching Options

vBSEO is now compatible with 4 different caching systems that are commonly installed on various server environments. Making use of these caching systems may result in performance improvements:

• memcached
• APC Cache
• XCache
• eAccelerator

(3) NEW FEATURE: Invert archive thread display order feature added. By default, the archive (or sitemap) thread links are displayed from oldest to newest. Enabling this option reverses the sitemap thread display order (displaying newest theads first), creating a hierarchical structure that links to the most recent content which naturally is the most important content in your forums. Let the search engines find your newest content first!

(4) NEW FEATURE: Incoming URLs with parameters (such as style IDs) will be 301 redirected to a non-parameter version for both search engines and guests. Parameters forwarded include:

Code:

'pp', 'highlight', 'order', 'sort', 'daysprune', 'referrerid'

Added the similar code for styleid/view parameters, applied to ALL.
New option added in config_vbseo.php file so that it can be manually disabled:

PHP Code:

    define('VBSEO_CLEANUP_REDIRECT',       1); 


(5) NEW FEATURE: Remove Last Post Column for Guest Visitors? feature hides the last post column on forumhome and forumdisplay pages for guest visitors (and search engines). Removing this content increases the C2C (Content to Code) ratio for these page, and gets rid of redirected links. In terms of PageRank, having fewer outbound links allows more PR to flow to the remaining links.

(6) NEW FEATURE: Remove Member DHTML Popup Dropdowns in Postbit For Guest Visitors feature gets rid of the DHTML popup window that is displayed for member usernames in posts for guest visitors (and search engines). The result is an improved C2C (Content to Code) ratio, and bandwidth savings.

Other updates will follow.....

Other Updates in vBSEO 3.1.0:

(7) UPDATE: "Update Services" now is implemented as a postponed update. Threads are processed for update services every 5 minutes in the background, eliminates any delay in display new thread pages for the user.

(8) UPDATE: Acronym Expansion feature now supports auto-linking. Terms can be replaced with a linked version whenever a link is defined as the replacement:

Code:

'vbseo'=>'http://www.vbseo.com'

The style of how the link is displayed can be defined in the config_vbseo.php file such as:



Wherever the term vBSEO occurs in your forum, 'vbseo' would be replaced with:



(9) UPDATE: Trackback spam almost completely eliminated by doing a remote IP address comparison to host IP for incoming trackbacks.

(10) UPDATE: LinkBack titles can be edited by double clicking and changing the text in the LinkBack display section of each forumdisplay and thread display page.

(11) UPDATE: LinkBack moderation list is now paginated.

(12) UPDATE: Acronym Expansions applied to Relevant Replacements text.

(13) UPDATE: "Select All" feature added for LinkBack moderation.

(14) UPDATE: Forum slugs now included in backup/restore settings.

(15) UPDATE: (Beta) Add Page Titles to External Links Anchor Text? feature as well as Linkbacks now handles linking between sites with different character encodings (ISO-8859-1, UTF-8, Windows-1256).

(16) UPDATE: Linkbacks are restricted if "Can View Forum" or "Can View Thread Content" are not permitted for guests.

(17) UPDATE: Linkback stopwords are now applied to the thread title of the forum page being linked to, on your site.

(18) UPDATE: Templates vbseo_linkbackbit and vbseo_linkbackmenu now use $stylevar array for image paths.

(19) UPDATE: Acronym Expansions applied to Relevant Replacements text.

(20) UPDATE: Redirect ("redirect-to") URLs set to check for JavaScript code to prevent cross site scripting vulnerabilities.

(21) UPDATE: Restructuring of database table indices when linkback table is queried.

(22) UPDATE: User details retrieval query eliminated on forum home / forum display pages for member URL formats without user ID.

(23) UPDATE: vBSEO modularization structure updated to allow for easier development of custom add-ons.

(24) UPDATE: Guests see dynamic lastpost links (in forumhome) when they point to restricted threads (public/restricted forums) and guests forumdisplay pages where thread reading is restricted.

(25) UPDATE: Eliminated a database query for the last post thread URL on member profile pages.

(26) UPDATE: Eliminated a database query for the member list page.

(27) UPDATE: Added support for rewriting new vBulletin member profile URL format: /member.php?username=Juan+Muriente

(28) UPDATE: Updated caching code to reduce the number of API calls.

(29) UPDATE: When vBSEO retrieves the title of a URL, it will omit generic titles that are the same as the forum title.

(30) UPDATE: Replace 'Previous/Next Thread' redirect links? feature updated to include stopwords elimination.

(31) UPDATE: No LinkBacks recorded for soft deleted threads.

(32) UPDATE: rel="novbseo" tag will always be processed. No configuration file enabling is required. define('VBSEO_ALLOW_REL_NOVBSEO', 0); has been deprecated.

(33) UPDATE: Custom Rewrite Rules (CRRs) will ignore anchors appended to embedded links when processing.

Fixes will follow.....

Fixes in vBSEO 3.1.0:

(34) FIX: Saving vbseocp.php settings from within vBulletin AdminCP caused page to refresh to vBSEO Control Panel only.

(35) FIX: Added "Status" HTTP header causing 500 error in some server configurations (PHP installed as fast-cgi).

(36) FIX: CRUs for /gallery/ URLs get replaced with forum root instead (such as /forum/).

(37) FIX: Last modified headers sending a "Date" header that was just approximately 1 second behind the "Last Modified" header for some page loads.

(38) FIX: With showpost URL rewriting off, showpost URLs were missing the showpost.php filename within the URL.

(39) FIX: Links to search within a thread not including anchor text to direct to specific matching post.

(40) FIX: Searching threads in threaded and hybrid modes causes post links to be incorrect.

(41) FIX: Nav Bullet (Tree Icon) Image URLs.

(42) FIX: PHP Fatal error: Cannot use string offset as an array in /home/nestreet/public_html/forum/includes/function s_vbseo.php on line 1301. Related to PHP Bug #32621.

(43) FIX: "Replace post number link with Permalink" not working if LinkBacks disabled.

(44) FIX: Incorrect home link in Archive/Sitemap breadcrumbs.

(45) FIX: UTF8 issue. Meta tags length calculated based on bytes (not real character length in 2-byte character sets).

(46) FIX: UTF8 issue. Garbled alt tag for image images with accented characters.

(47) FIX: Forwarding to forum display after creating new thread in moderated forum had incorrect forum display URL.

(48) FIX: Debugging explanation link in member profile page not working.

(49) FIX: Links on search results page (search.php) broken whnen search.php added to the vBSEO exclude list.

(50) FIX: Duplicate refBack links.

(51) FIX: Issue with LinkBack preview text due to issue with the way PHP strip_tags() function processes.

(52) FIX: "new post icons" issue when automatic database marking is set in vBulletin 3.6.8.

(53) FIX: Categories as anchors, sitemap linking to default catgory URL.

(54) FIX: Missing /forum/ section in copy/pasted URLs.

(55) FIX: Fatal error: Call to undefined function: mb_list_encodings()

(56) FIX: PHP Warning: Header may not contain more than a single header, new line detected.

(57) FIX: Invalid URL format in email notices of new registration.

(58) FIX: META description generated by vBSEO from first post containing HTML formatted table was missing spacing between terms.

(59) FIX: Forums named with punctuation at the end (such as "!") were not rewriting correctly. Included a "-" at the end.

(60) FIX: Retrieving page titles for pages without a title, or pages with restricted access (such as .htaccess password protection) resulted in the link disappearing from the post.

Final notes will follow.....

NOTE: If your license is currently expired you will need to renew prior to installation (check status on license list).

vBSEO 3.1.0 is also available in other languages.
At present, the vBSEO Control Panel can be viewed in your choice of:

• English
• German (Du & Sie)
  
• Turkish
• Dutch
  
• Russian
• Arabic
• Spanish (New!)

We hope to add even more new languages in the future. Thanks to Global Partners and Translators for their hard work.

Download Location
All Licensed users may download vBSEO 3.1.0 from their User Control Panel at the vBSEO Home forums. Under the "Miscellaneous" section, there will be a link to "Download vBSEO". Or visit http://www.vbseo.com/downloads/

Installation & Upgrade
Find detailed installation and upgrade instructions within the readme.html file included in the 'docs' folder of the installation package.

Thread open for discussion.

Rock on.

Nice, I still haven't had time to check the pre-release version..lol
Should get things updated this weekend for sure.

Nice list of bug fixes

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

One question: when upgrading, do we really do as the upgrade instructions say and upload the /includes/config_vbseo.php and overwrite the one with current settings in it? (does the xml export now include the settings in the beta section such as forum slugs or do we still need to copy these in manually?)

Thanks to the team for their hard work and dedication to the community. Looking forward to updating very soon.

R'gards,

Jim

Thanks for the current version I'm renewing my vBSEO license now

OK, just did the upgrade and it was very easy.

To answer my own question above: no forum_slugs settings were not saved and restored by doing the xml all settings backup from 3.0.0 and import to 3.1.0, so if you use forum slugs be sure you manually restore them to the new vbseo_config.php
From now on this won't be a problem, since as stated above 3.1.0 does back them up (and it's probably obvious to those who spend more time working with the product)Also a minor point, but the instructions say:

1. Copy/Paste your current key: 32_digit_key_in_red into the license key field provided:
   1. If your license key does not turn green, please contact licenses@removed-for-forum-post
2. Click on the 'Browse' button within the 'Upload a Settings (.xml) File' box.
3. Upload your previously saved vbseo_all.xml settings file.

I did it in this order, but found that after I imported the .xml file my license key again showed red and I had to again copy and paste it to get it to turn green. Should step 1 actually come after 2&3?

Thanks again for the awesome release of the world's best vBulletin SEO product

Newsletter:

vBSEO has released 3.1 Gold which is no longer encrypted. Testing has shown a big increase in performance and a big decrease in in server resource usage.

Hello 6piston

You will no longer need to use IonCube or Zend. The result is a faster forum with vBSEO.

And to top that off vBSEO now offers a branding free option. You read that right, branding free.

This is all very exciting news from crawlability. I have been running the unecrypted code for several weeks at all my sites and it is much faster.

Check it out at vBulletin SEO by vBSEO

-Faster?
-Better?

i've just downloaded 3.1.0 and will upgrade ASAP!

WOW - really so much faster, don't know if it's just vbseo, or the fact that I've selected vbseo's xcache option or both, only thing I know is that I haven't seen my site this fast in a long time (if ever)!

THANKS!