Server Work Tonight (and today)

[Scott Greczkowski]

Hey guys...

Tonight we will be doing some serious work to our servers as we are looking to get rid of the vbSEO plugin we use as we have been having issues with it. Tonight we will be testing if we can remove it, and seeing what issues we might have if we remove it and if we find no issues then we will remove it.

The major concern in removing it is losing all 500,000 plus links to us on sites like Google and Bing. One of the main features of vbSEO is it changes the forum software urls into friendly urls which can be more easily indexed by the search engines.

For example.

Instead of a URL being www.satelliteguys.us/showthread.php?t=290570 it turns it into a more friendlier URL of http://www.satelliteguys.us/dish-net...pm-uplink.html

The big issue here is I do not want to lose all the links from the search engines. I want all the friendly urls to continue to work.



I have been sent some NGINX rewrite rules which should make it so that the friendly links continue working. However I am told the rules are untested which is why I must test them tonight and see if they work. When I am doing this testing I am planning on keeping the site open, however for some periods some things might not work correctly since the links might change (which I am trying to avoid but wont know until I try it)

In addition one of the other big feature is one that many SatelliteGuys members really like... and that is the Likes System.

Today I am going to try installing a more advanced version of the Likes system and disable the vbSEO likes system. According to reports I "should" be able to import all the likes from the vbSEO system, however a small number of people have reported issues doing this. I am going to try my best to avoid resetting the likes system again. I was not happy last time whenthe likes system reset a month ago as that was not supposed to happen. So I will do my best to prevent the restting of them again today.

One of the other thing that vbSEO does is allows for easy intergration with our Cloud Server service. Our Cloud Server (vb4.satguys.us) serves all of our static content such as graphics, attachments and static HTML files. I will need to go in and code in our Cloud Server into our styles. While I am doing this there might be some missing images for a few moments.

The decission to move off of vbSEO is not one that was made lightly. But with the advances of vbulletin there really is no need for vbSEO now. vbSEO is only really useful now as it does a lot of thngs in one package, but most everything it does can be done by other packages or its a built in vbulletin feature now.

The only way we will not move off of vbSEO is if the old friendly links do not work in our testing tonight. As it would really hurt SatelliteGuys if all the links out there no longer worked.

Thanks for your understanding as we continue to make SatelliteGuys better for YOU!

[Hall]

One of the main features of vbSEO is it changes the forum software urls into friendly urls which can be more easily indexed by the search engines.

For example.

Instead of a URL being www.satelliteguys.us/showthread.php?t=290570 it turns it into a more friendlier URL of http://www.satelliteguys.us/dish-net...pm-uplink.html

I can't imagine why search engines care what the full URL looks like. Obviously if someone felt the need to write this tool that changes them though, it must be the case.... Always thought Google and other search engines looked at the content and then simply linked to the URL.

[ke4est]

I hope all goes well.

[Scott Greczkowski]

Search engines look for keywords, and thats how they rank you based on keyworks.

having showthread?t=290570 means nothing to the search engine, but when it sees DISH Network Uplink Report then it has some keywords to index. The more keywords the higher it ranks you. Web site search engine optimization is a really wild and complicated thing there are all kind of tricks to get your site higer ranked and vbSEO did a lot of those... but now so does vbulletin by default.

[Scott Greczkowski]

Ok the Likes feature is done. And I think I "Like" it.

Now working on the cloud servers which serve our images, avatars, static images etc.

While I am doing this some things (like images) might not load correctly. Don't worry though things will be back to normal in a few minutes.

[Scott Greczkowski]

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ADVERTISING BOX

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Ok all images and static files are now once again being served from the Cloud servers.