Google SEO 1.1.10 (Security Update)

[frostschutz]

The development of this plugin started when Google released a document called "Google's Search Engine Optimization starter guide" in Nov 2008. After a long public beta phase the plugin finally reached stable status in March 2009.

The goal of this plugin is to implement SEO in MyBB according to the guidelines presented in Google's SEO starter guide, to make MyBB more friendly to both users and search engines.

This plugin requires Apache with mod_rewrite, MySQL, PHP with mbstring, and MyBB 1.4 with UTF-8 encoding. MySQL 5, PHP 5 is highly recommended. Unfortunately, one core file has to be modified to make SEO URLs work.

This plugin is free open source software (GPL). This means that you can download the plugin for free, modify it to your liking, and you don't have to put any copyright or backlinks on your page.

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The plugin currently supports the following features (each of these can be configured separately):

• Google SEO 404:
  - error pages return 404 error code instead of 200
  - add Google's 404 widget to 404 error pages
  - custom 404 error pages
• Google SEO Meta:
  - generate description meta tags for forums / threads / etc.
  - specify canonical pages
• Google SEO Redirect:
  - redirect old URLs to new URLs
  - this avoids URL breakage and double content
• Google SEO Sitemap:
  - dynamic generation of XML Sitemaps
  - search engines find your content without crawling
• Google SEO URL:
  - replace standard id based URLs (e.g. showthread.php?tid=12345) with name based URLs (e.g. Thread-some-subject)
  - UTF-8 in URLs is supported
  - uniquifier is applied for non-unique URLs
  

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Google SEO 1.1.10 fixes a security issue, so everyone is advised to update.

Changelog: http://mods.mybboard.net/change-log/google-seo
Download: http://mods.mybboard.net/view/google-seo

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Known bugs:
- MyBB's parameter cleaning code does not clean int parameters if the value is "lastposter". This causes SQL errors. (will be fixed in the next version)
- some links keep using the old URL scheme, because MyBB is not using its own get_*_link() functions everywhere (fixing this would require changes to MyBB code)
- search highlight links are broken for searches that contain / (fixing this would require changes to MyBB code. workaround: set MyBB SEF URLs to 'yes')
- strange requests like ?cfg[rootpath]=foobar cause warnings with Redirect and the [rootpath]=foobar is lost (won't fix stupid PHP)

Features planned for future releases:
- URL: more powerful URL handling (requires database change), virtual directory structure support (despite knowing that not all issues can be solved)
- Sitemap: customizable priority, automatic changefreq
- Redirect: more options to avoid special corner cases that cause problems on some hosts
- Meta: enhance description generation by skipping very short postings in favour of longer ones, prevent indexing of non-canonicals

Other suggestions which probably won't be implemented but are open to discussion:
- nofollow some internal links (google seo does not really do stuff you can do in templates at this point - also depends on individual themes so no general purpose solution can be made. plus it's not important, as robots.txt >> nofollow anyways)
- nofollow all posted links (there's another plugin: http://community.mybboard.net/thread-54469.html - see also my comments there)

If you come across any bugs, please report them in this thread or PM me, preferably with steps to reproduce. If you have any suggestions or proposals for feature enhancements, please post them in this thread. Thank you for your support!

[Tom Loveric]

Approved I'm assuming this is the first non-beta release?

[Bey Brad]

i am so pumped you have no idea

thanks so much

[MattRogowski]

Approved on Mods site.

I'm interested in using this for the sitemap, at minimum...

[Sebastian1990]

Upgraded from Version 0.8.
Works fine

[Bey Brad]

Installed, seems fine. Good work.

[frostschutz]

Thanks for approving this so quickly. Glad you like the plugin.

[Bey Brad]

http://worldbeyblade.org/sitemap-index.xml I don't understand. Can you explain the sitemap a little more?

[frostschutz]

The sitemap standard (or that what Google, Yahoo, Ask etc. are using) is described here:

http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php

The sitemap index is an Sitemap index file as described on that page. It links to the actual sitemap files.

Google SEO Sitemaps are created dynamically. When you tell Google about your Sitemap (in Google Webmaster Tools, or by specifying it in your robots.txt file) it will download the index, and then browse through the sitemaps listed in this index. So Google goes through your Sitemap page by page similar to how a user goes through your forums page by page.

It's split into pages because creating a sitemap for tens of thousands of threads, users and forums all at once would cause too much load. Plus sitemaps have a limitation of 50000 items per sitemap.

The sitemaps are created dynamically and not statically in a task like how its done by the other plugin, in order to give Google and other search engines the current up to date status of your forum whenever it chooses to access your sitemap - and not possible a twenty four hour old version. This way Google gets up to date sitemaps as early as possible which leads to google accessing your new content it found via the sitemap as early as possible which leads to your new content getting indexed as early as possible.

[aglioeolio]

I´ve just subscribed to this thread

thanks for releasing, frostschutz, I´ll try it in next few days