Forum Moderators: rogerd
there is a well known plugin for vbulletin which rewrites the URLs to static and includes the title words in the url.
just wondered whether anyone had used it and what their experiences are?
i am worried that
a) the plugin might not be maintained over time
b) about vbulletin bringing out their own plugin to do the same, resulting in compatibility issues.
much appreciate any feedback!
Works just fine in terms of getting pages indexed. As for the authors maintaining it, I'll assume you are talking about for future vb upgrades. I'm guessing it's popular enough that it will always be updated by one person or another. But it would be important to keep your filenames consistent once indexed. So it would be good to understand how it works.
baze
thanks for reply. i don't think i shall go with it. the archive function of vbulletin works well and many popular forums have lots of dynamic pages indexed as well.
the out of the box solution needs third party software on the server; whilst the d.i.y version will undoubtedly make updating harder - easy updates is the main reason we are switching to vb!.
cheers
You are right to be cautious of hacks, as they do present a barrier to updating. In evaluating each hack, though, I'd suggest looking at the popularity of the hack (popular ones are likely to be supported), how support has been to date (many problems reported? addressed quickly?), and how complex the changes are. If you are only changing a few lines of code in one file, upgrading will be a lot easier than if there are extensive changes.
Note, too, that vBulletin 3.5 is moving toward a plug-in system for many mods, which will make updating far easier. Unfortunately, I'd guess there would be major template changes if all of your URLs change. The standard vBulletin has tons of links everywhere.
the upgrading and template changes is exactly the problem.
since i purchased vb 2 weeks ago there has already been one update - it was extremely painless as i have not done much customisation to templates; however, in that time, there have also been 2 updates to this hack - doubling the work needed to update.
it works like a plugin and is easy to install, but makes many changes to the templates.
i am hoping that maybe vb themselves will bring out an se-friendly version / hack soon - there is obviously demand for it - and when that time comes, i'll might go with that.
i don't believe having one query string will negatively affect our rankings in any way. webmasterworld used to rank excellently without any keywords in the urls - so it will be a case of using good text to link to the important posts from the rest our other sites.
our forums are already 4 years old, and i am keen to make it as easy as possible for the long term future ;)
(am actually on a *nix server, but would need zend encoder, which isn't compatible with phpaccelerator).
thanks for input
For example, a pleasant surprise was an option to have it insert image HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes everywhere, if you provide the appropriate numbers. I haven't used VB long, but this is one of my pet peeves with it. (BTW I have no idea how much processing power this feature uses. Possibly a lot.)
I am also concerned with the issues you raised, especially because I like to take a long view of things. All I can say is that I don't feel like I'm taking on any additional risk vs. the options of doing nothing or using a different solution.
there is a well known plugin for vbulletin which rewrites the URLs to static and includes the title words in the url.just wondered whether anyone had used it and what their experiences are?
i am worried that
a) the plugin might not be maintained over time
b) about vbulletin bringing out their own plugin to do the same, resulting in compatibility issues.much appreciate any feedback!
Me too the same question.
Please suggest whether to buy that paid seo plugin or not?
