MyBB Community Forums

Plugin Name: Canonical
Plugin Author: Jesse Labrocca
Plugin Website: http://www.MybbCentral.com
Plugin Version: 1.0
Plugin Mybb Compatibility: 1.4x
Plugin File Edits: None
Plugin File Uploads: 1
Plugin Description: This plugin will allow your site to adhere to the new rel=canonical standard for better SEO by adding the tag to headerinclude. Currently working only for forumsdisplay.php and showthread.php. (read below for more details)

http://www.mybbcentral.com/thread-2644.html <-- Download Link
[Some plugins at Mybb Central are for paid subscribers only]

More about CANONICAL
============================
Recently Google, MSN, and Yahoo! search engines created a new method for indexing urls. You can read some of that info here:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice...alization/
http://blogs.msdn.com/webmaster/archive/...ssues.aspx
http://ysearchblog.com/2009/02/12/fighti...ur-quiver/

Currently Mybb creates many duplicate URLs. Even under their SEF the issue exists:
Examples at Mybboard.net:

http://community.mybboard.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=81&datecut=0&sortby=rating&order=desc
http://community.mybboard.net/thread-34110-post-228845.html#pid228845
http://community.mybboard.net/showthread.php?mode=linear&tid=34110&pid=228845#pid228845

This plugin would instead rel=canonical into cleaner URLs:

http://community.mybboard.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=81
http://community.mybboard.net/thread-34110-page-2.html
http://community.mybboard.net/thread-34110-page-2.html

As you can see from the above example link 2 and 3 are the exact same content but Mybb would have multiple URLs all displaying that content.

I have in the extras folder a screenshot showing a handful of URLs inside my Google Webmaster Tools section. Take a peek. You can see the duplicate URLs that Google views:
/showthread.php?tid=1047&page=10
/showthread.php?tid=1047&pid=211134
/showthread.php?tid=1047&pid=401316
/showthread.php?tid=1047
/showthread.php?tid=54074&action=nextoldest

With this plugin search engines will be given the url correctly as showthread.php?tid=1047 as the main URL to index.

This will also work with pages as this:

http://www.hackforums.net/showthread.php?tid=1047&pid=401316

will get indexed correctly as this:

http://www.hackforums.net/showthread.php?tid=1047&page=11

I suggest you do read up on the above blog posts from the search engines to learn more about what this plugin is meant to do.

DEMO: http://www.mybbcentral.com

Thank you.

Very good! I'll be trying this later

Thanks Tom. It's very thoroughly tested. It should help a lot of sites with SEO that use Google Webmaster Tools and want to ensure that only 1 page gets indexed and that the search engines are not confused about which url to use.

Well I have an indexer that I made(very, very, very, very..you get the point by now, right? basic) and it just searches my localhost folder for files, and indexes them when I view my site.(it stores them in the database) I was thinking of releasing it, but I know someone will rip it and say it's theirs. Anyways, I'll definitely be testing it to see if I any find any bugs.

Are you talking about a sitemap Tom? This isn't that. It's actually something that would compliment most existing sitemaps. I have a sitemap addon actually I am working on. The current ones are a bit overdone imho and I want a simpler solution that's effective. I don't believe a Sitemap needs settings or templates.

Heh.
You forgot the .com in the demo link. But I think everyone knows how to get to MyBBCentral.

lol...thanks Dalton.

Thank you for this one. Great work.

wonderful, exciting release, nicely done dude

Bril Plugin . SEO yer