Deactivating VBSEO

[TransAmDan]

Fro many years now we have been running a forum plugin called VBSEO. This has been great for changing the names of pages to contain the title of the forum thread, it also enhances many other things too.

Last night the forum was running an 'httpd' process at 100%, we have a dual core processor so its not too bad that half of it was running a process that appears to be hung up in a loop. Well this morning i terminated this process though the SSH interface, and it respawns another. So all is good there.

Well I got an email from Google, they index many pages on our website, and they were returning an error 500, this in an internal server error. However when viewing the pages they appears to view okay, it had this message in the header though. So I disabled many plug ins, including google pagespeed, any caching plugins, and retried. I kept getting the same HTTP response code, however if you refreshed the pages a few times it becomes an HTTP 200, this is a good response.

Anyway i contacted the place where the web server lives, and they done quite deep investigation into this.

They found this in the error log.

[Mon Oct 28 10:51:33 2013] [error] PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /vbseo/includes/functions_vbseo_ui.php(31) : eval()'d code on line 1, referer: http://www.solent-renegades.co.uk/renegades-cafe/index2.html [Mon Oct 28 10:51:33 2013] [error] PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_CLASS in /var/www/vhosts/solent-renegades.co.uk/httpdocs/vbseo/includes/functions_vbseo_ui.php(237) : eval()'d code on line 2, referer: http://www.solent-renegades.co.uk/renegades-cafe/index2.html

This is indicating the 'functions_vbseo_ui.php' has an issue. I have re-uploaded all VBSEO files since then. However troubles registering the full version key, so I try the VBSEO website, they are out of business. Is that the reason VBSEO isn't working as it contacts their server to check licensing.

I have now removed VBSEO from the system, although this gives us different page names. I will work on this to make them more like what they were, as there are other methods. On reading info about VBSEO it seems it have great enhancements for vBulletin version 3, as it didn't have these functions built in, however vBulletin version 4 has quite a lot of it built in. We have version 4. So perhaps thats why VBSEO died, they no longer supported it as it wasn't really required any more...

Anyway, the forum is functional now.
Going to dabble in the URL rewrite (sensible page names) to get it similar to what we had before.

 

[TransAmDan]

Looks like all pages are working now with a slightly different name. If you come to a page with isn't there, then you end up on the Forum home page.

I'll get back to work now... :ballchain:

 

[TransAmDan]

The worst thing about deactivating the SEO plug in is all the page names changed. This means if you were to click on an old link from another website to our website it likely to be the incorrect URL. I think i have worked out a formula so if anyone clicks on an old link to a forum thread, it will take you to the correct thread. If you go to the old link for the Wheels Day 2014 page, it will take you there. However no all paged on the home page are redirected to the new URL as there are 200 pages to manually configure for that. Also any links to the photo album area will be incorrect too. It will sort itself out in the search engines like Google. However any hard links from other website will take you to our website, but not the correct page.

I will add in manual redirect here and there to take you to the correct page, it will all just take time. On the whole I think it was a good move, and trying to make the best of it.

 

[TransAmDan]

Well its been a few days now since turning it off. there will be many links on the internet pointing to pages which have technically moved on the website, which users will be directed to the main page. I've tried routing to the correct page, but as there is 18000 pages on the website it would take some time, although most of the forum ones are okay now, but there is still 200 articles, I have sorted the top 30 popular ones.

Anyway, time to look at the Crawl stats in google.

I've drawn a light green line where the time was that VBSEO was turned off. The top one is the number of pages crawls per day. Googlebot (googles computer reading web pages) comes around many times per day indexing new pages. Now that many of the pages are moved I guess it would start indexing many 'new' pages, it took a few days but then that's normal. The next one below in red is the amount of bandwidth google bot is using. It was downloading about 50mb per day, but shot up to 400Mb per day. considering its not indexing images just pages, that quite a bit of bandwidth. Its no where near our limit, although it it kept up for a month on the old server we may have had issues. i expect this to settle once google has cached all the 'new' pages.
The bottom one is nice to see though. After disabling VBSEO the pages are served much quicker. Almost 400mS now, where before we were over 600mS, so many good things have come of disabling. However the down side, is pages that are not optimized for search engine indexing. I need to do some work on that adding in come meta tags for pages, and also looking into URL rewrite on many other sections of the forum to.