Google SEO [HISTORICAL]

[frostschutz]

Thanks for testing.

Unfortunately the new beta breaks PHP 4 compatibility after all, PHP 4 version of parse_ini_file is more lacking in functionality than I thought. So PHP5 + MySQL is required for it to work currently. I can try to restore PHP 4 compatibility if there is demand (I'd have to install PHP 4 on my system for proper testing). Support for databases other than MySQL is a bit of a challenge. I wonder if it's worth the effort when 95% of users are using (or should be using) PHP5+MySQL.

This plugin is growing quite big. I'm planning to rename this project to "Google SEO plugin suite" that consists of several smaller plugins that take care of functionality that is more or less unrelated to each other, for example "Google SEO URLs" plugin for the URLs part, "Google SEO 404 pages" for the 404 pages and Google 404 widget, "Google SEO Sitemap" for the XML Sitemap, "Google SEO meta" for meta tags, etc. etc.

This should make settings easier to browse (right now already 28 settings in one group, freaking long list, in the future smaller settings group for each plugin), and the user can choose which parts of functionality to enable.

[Tom Loveric]

I'm not using PHP4 I'm using PHP5 on my website's server, and PHP5 on my localhost. Even though I could switch to PHP4 on my website's server. lol

[frostschutz]

I got rid of the google_seo.ini and moved the settings back into the code (as array). This restores PHP 4 compatibility.

Download: http://www.metamorpher.de/files/google_seo_0.3.php.txt

There is no other change so if the ini version worked for you no need to switch.

[achraf]

very nice my friend
good work
thank you very mutch

[Falcao]

In my opinion, this google-plugin is very important for mybb. So good luck !

[frostschutz]

Happy new year, everyone. I hope you had some nice holidays.

Updated plugin to version 0.4. It's still BETA, it's still not recommended for production use.

Changes:
- several minor bug fixes
- unapproved / invisible threads no longer turn up in the Sitemap
- support for 404 error page (.htaccess ErrorDocument directive)
- started adding support for meta description tags (only threads and forums for now, user profiles and other pages in the next version)
- sitemap is /Sitemap-Index now, instead of Sitemap-index

Documentation: http://www.metamorpher.de/files/google_seo_0.4.txt
Download link: http://www.metamorpher.de/files/google_seo_0.4.zip
Demo: http://googlemybb.bplaced.net

Please help improving this plugin by testing and reporting bugs. Thank you!

[Tom Loveric]

Updated! I'll test for bugs later though, kind've busy right now

[frostschutz]

Bugs found so far:
- Meta description feature causes SQL error for links to deleted threads
- URL redirection doesn't check for user permissions, so Google SEO URLs can for example give away subjects of threads the user doesn't have permission to read, provided the user enters the correct ID for those forums/threads. Users still won't be able to read the actual thread though, he'll simply end up on a no permissions page that happens to have the URL Thread-Some-secret-thread.

Bugs I can't manage to reproduce:
- Apparently duplicate key SQL errors can occur when updating a large number of URLs at a time (tested with >1000 threads). No idea how that can happen (row is actually deleted before insert so duplicates shouldn't be possible).

Features requested:
- Customizable character translation (ë -> e, か -> ka, ß -> ss, etc.), I'll implement this sometime. Character replacement mapping will have to be created by the user, as every language has a different idea on how to replace characters (Ä -> A or Ä -> Ae).
- Append ID to every URL wether unique or not. Would be easy to implement as the Uniquifier already does this for URLs that would not be unique without ID. However if you wanted to retain IDs, it's not very efficient to use a plugin that goes great lengths to get rid of IDs in the first place. If I implement this it'll come with a recommendation to leave it off.

Further development:
A more complete implementation of Meta descriptions is pretty much all that's left to do. I'll split the plugin into several smaller ones, so users can select the functionality they want in more detail (currently it already has 30 configuration settings, number is likely to grow).

ETA for going stable is sometime March 2009.

[Sebastian1990]

Suggestion: I think it looks beautiful if the URL is so
http://googlemybb.bplaced.net/Thread-Bugs/

instead of http://googlemybb.bplaced.net/Thread-Bugs
On the end an '/'.

[frostschutz]

I don't think it looks beautiful at all. A / at the end suggests that it is a directory. A directory is not a document by itself, instead it's something that contains several independent documents. This is not the case with threads at all, even if it can be several pages long, a thread is one document.

Using a directory structure also causes many unnecessary problems. Links no longer work in MyBB because they are relative. You'd have to force them to work using a <base> tag in your header. Which can lead to other problems.

If you absolutely want to do this, you already can. The plugin is customizable, it lets you specify a suffix for each URL. Although it's meant for users who want to keep an .html ending, you can specify the suffix to be /. You will have to modify your .htaccess accordingly (add a new set of rules that understands the suffix, example pattern is already provided in the Google SEO docs), and you can add a <base> HTML tag to your headerinclude template. And it will work.

However I can not recommend this at all. Using directories does nothing to help SEO, it only makes the URLs longer, and it does a lot of damage due to links etc. no longer working.