Language Packs

Language Packs for this plugin may be available on the MyBB Mods site, but there is no guarantee they will be up to date. This plugin has very few (less than ten) language strings that will be used outside of the Admin CP. You will find them in googleseo.lang.php. You can either translate them yourself or leave them as is.

Page number in forum and thread titles

By default, MyBB does not include a page number in the title. This causes Google to complain about lots of duplicate title tags for forums and threads which have many pages.

Google SEO Meta provides a variable which you can include into your forumdisplay and showthread templates. However if you want this, you have to edit these templates manually.

Example <title> tag in the showthread template:

<title>{$thread['subject']}{$google_seo_page}</title>

The variable will only be set for pages > 1, so this change would lead to page titles like "Subject" for page 1 and "Subject - Page 2" for page 2.

Redirect Loops

If you experience redirect loops (redirects that never end) please enable the Debug Redirect feature and send me the debug output. Please note that the debug output may contain confidential information (such as login cookies), so please don't post it in public, but email / PM me directly.

If you are using an alternative webserver, you can also give the LiteSpeed / Nginx workaround settings a try (even if you're not using those webservers) and see if they help.

Otherwise, disable Redirect until a solution can be found.

Redirecting SEO URLs back to MyBB stock URLs

Google SEO does not force you to keep using its URLs. If you want to go back to stock URLs, you can do so. Basically you have two options to achieve a SEO URL -> Stock URL redirection:

• Empty the SEO URL scheme for a particular URL type

  This is useful if for example you want to go back to stock URLs for user profiles only, but not for forums and threads.

• Revert changes to core files

  This way the Google SEO URL module will be in inactive state.

Do not disable Google SEO URL or Redirect, and do not remove the Rewrite Rules from your .htaccess. All of these components are required to keep old keyword URLs and subsequent redirect working.

Sitemap Generation

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

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

The sitemap-index.xml is an Sitemap index file as described there. It links to the actual sitemap files (sitemap-threads.xml?page=1).

Google SEO Sitemaps are created dynamically. When you tell Google about your XML 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. Also, sitemaps have a limitation of 50000 items per sitemap.

The Sitemap is created dynamically 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. 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 by Google as early as possible.

Please note that the Sitemap displays only forums and threads that the current user can actually read. So if you see private threads in your sitemap, it may be because you're currently logged in as admin, and does not mean that Google will see those threads too.

Submit Sitemap to Search Engines

For the Sitemap to be of any use, you have to submit it to Search Engines. You can automate this process by adding a Sitemap directive to your robots.txt (example robots.txt included in the Google SEO package). By default your Sitemap will be called sitemap-index.xml.

Evaluation Mode

Google SEO URL has two possible modes of operation.

In Full Mode (Default), every time a SEO URL is requested, it will be obtained and returned immediately. In worst case (if the URL is not cached), this will require a database query. When querying URLs from the database, Google SEO tries to query as many URLs as possible in one go, but it can't always predict which URLs will be required for the rest of the page, especially when other plugins create links too.

In Lazy Mode, Google SEO returns a place holder instead of the SEO URL. Just before the page is sent to the user, it will then proceed to replace all placeholders with the SEO URL. This way, all URLs that are on the page can be handled in a single query.

The downside of Lazy Mode is that there's no guarantee that a requested URL will be used in the output. It might just as well become part of some notification mail or used for other purposes. Since this is most likely to happen during POST requests, Lazy Mode will only work for GET requests and fall back to Full Mode for POST requests.

If you feel that Google SEO uses too many queries on your board, or if your board is just very large and active, or if your database just happens to be very slow, Lazy Mode might be for you. Otherwise stick to Full Mode as it is much more reliable.

Uniquifier

The Google SEO URL Uniquifier is applied to URLs that would otherwise not be unique (and thus result in threads that are not accessible). Collision testing (for example for two threads with the same title) is done only once, therefore the uniquifier must result in a truly unique URL that can not possibly collide with anything else.

A good uniquifier needs to fulfill these two criteria:

1. contain the items unique {id}
2. contain punctuation that cannot occur in non-uniquified URLs

Early versions of Google SEO used {url}-{id} as uniquifier and therefore did not fulfill criteria 2. This could lead to collisions in rare cases, for example:

ID: 1, Title: Unique,   URL: Thread-Unique
ID: 2, Title: Unique 3, URL: Thread-Unique-3
ID: 3, Title: Unique,   URL: Thread-Unique-3 (same as Thread 2)

Thread 3 collides with Thread 1 (both are called Unique), so the uniquifier is applied. This results in Unique-3. However, there already happens to be a thread called Unique-3. Doesn't work.

With the new uniquifier {url}{separator}{separator}{id}, the uniquified URL will be Thread-Unique--3. Because the id is already unique, and other URLs can't contain -- (title punctuation is reduced to one single separator, not two), that makes the URL as a whole unique.

If you use a custom uniquifier, make sure it fulfills the two criteria listed above. Be aware that special punctuation characters like :@/?& or space can break your URLs.

Character Translation

Please note that translation of characters is not required (browsers and Google handle them just fine), and it causes additional CPU cost.

You can do character translation in URLs if you so desire. In the textbox of the character translation setting, specify one character per line and its replacement, separated by =.

For example the following would replace German umlauts with their most commonly used ASCII counterparts:

Ä = Ae
Ö = Oe
Ü = Ue
ä = ae
ö = oe
ü = ue
ß = ss

With this character translation setting, Thread-Übergrößenträger would appear as Thread-Uebergroessentraeger instead.

URL Schemes

Google SEO uses a simple, static URL scheme by default (Forum-Name, Thread-Name, etc.). This is recommended because it tells users and search engines exactly what to expect behind an URL. It is possible to customize the URL scheme with various settings. However, not every scheme will actually work. When customizing URL schemes, you have to be aware of the limitations of both this plugin and MyBB.

Forum:         forumdisplay.php?{url}
Thread:        showthread.php?{url}
Announcements: announcements.php?{url}
Users:         member.php?action=profile&{url}
Calendars:     calendar.php?{url}
Events:        calendar.php?action=event&{url}

?Something-{url}
?something={url}

forumdisplay.php?google_seo_forum={url}
showthread.php?google_seo_thread={url}
...

<base href="{$settings['bburl']}/" />

Forum:         f-{url}/
Thread:        f-{url}
Announcements: f-{url}
Users:         u-{url}/
Calendars:     c-{url}/
Events:        c-{url}
Parent Forum:        {parent}/f-{url}
Parent Thread:       {parent}/t-{url}
Parent Announcement: {parent}/a-{url}
Parent Event:        {parent}/e-{url}

# Google SEO URL Forums:
RewriteRule ^f\-([^./]+)/?$ forumdisplay.php?google_seo_forum=$1 [L,QSA,NC]
RewriteRule ^f\-([^.]+)/f-([^./]+)/?$ forumdisplay.php?google_seo_forum=$1/f-$2 [L,QSA,NC]

# Google SEO URL Threads:
RewriteRule ^f\-([^.]+)/t-([^./]+)$ showthread.php?google_seo_thread=$1/t-$2 [L,QSA,NC]

# Google SEO URL Announcements:
RewriteRule ^f\-([^.]+)/a-([^./]+)$ announcements.php?google_seo_announcement=$1/a-$2 [L,QSA,NC]

# Google SEO URL Users:
RewriteRule ^u\-([^./]+)/?$ member.php?action=profile&google_seo_user=$1 [L,QSA,NC]

# Google SEO URL Calendars:
RewriteRule ^c\-([^./]+)/?$ calendar.php?google_seo_calendar=$1 [L,QSA,NC]

# Google SEO URL Events:
RewriteRule ^c\-([^./]+)/e-([^./]+)$ calendar.php?action=event&google_seo_event=$1/e-$2 [L,QSA,NC]

Forum:         Forum?{url}
Thread:        Thread?{url}
Announcements: Announcement?{url}
Users:         User?{url}/
Calendars:     Calendar?{url}/
Events:        Event?{url}
Parent Forum:        {parent}/{url}
Parent Thread:       {parent}/{url}
Parent Announcement: {parent}/{url}
Parent Event:        {parent}/{url}