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Properly Backing Up Your vBulletin Database
| CommentsThis is our first article in a series that will outline how to properly backup your entire site and use it to setup a test environment on your current hosting account.
When you install vBulletin, one of its core components is the MySQL database. This database holds all the information for your entire site including settings, templates, users, posts and statistical information to name the least. If the database would ever become corrupt to an unrecoverable point, or should your hosting company have a data-loss issue, or a hacker wipes out your database this information is all unrecoverable unless you have a reliable backup method in place.
Making database backups is the most essential in this process. File backups can be taken less frequently since files hardly change. vBulletin using php scripting technology that makes your site dynamic, and to call information from the database and serve it to the end user, making the need for many files or changes to those files largely unneeded. We’re going to cover the basics of the MySQL database first, followed up with file system backups.
Tools you’ll need
- PuTTy (a free windows SSH client)
- FTP Program of your choice
The only 100% reliable method of backing up your database is via the SSH interface also known as the command line. By issuing 1 simple command you can have your database backed up and ready to go to your home computer for a secure off site backup. This method assumes you are on cPanel hosting, and SSH is available to you.
- Login to your server via the PuTTy client (SSH) if available. If you do not have SSH available contact your hosting company or skip to the PhpMyAdmin Section.
- You’ll need to login as the the account user, or under the “root/super user” account.
- Once there create a new directory to store backups. Run the following command: mkdir backups (I strongly suggest this is not stored in the public_html folder any where!)
- Navigate into your new backup folder with: cd backups
- Next is the fun part of backing up your database You’ll need to know your database username and password or have the root account information. The following command is what you want to use: mysqldump -u account_dbusername -p database_name.sql | gzip -9 database_backup.sql.gz
Your database is now backed up, in a compressed format for storage efficency. But you aren’t done yet, the key to taking backups is to move them off-site (off the hosting company server). You’ll need to login to your hosting account via FTP and navigate to the backups folder you created. Download the database_backup.sql.gz file
Some links maybe of interest for you:
Many forum owners have been contacting us lately with a common question. Whats the difference between your SEO Service and the SEO Software available for vBulletin?
The difference is actually huge. Our SEO service is for any website, it doesn’t have to be vBulletin powered, or any type of software in particular, it can be anything as simple as a product information page, or a complexe site with thousands of pages.
Our SEO Service delivers results far beyond that of any buy and go software package. We take many factors into consideration a prepackaged software solution won’t be able to take into consideration, and as the major search engines are constantly changing their methods, why wait for software to release updates that could leave your previous work rendered useless or have to be redone? Why risk the chance of that software company not being around for the next update leaving you stuck with software thats no longer valid!
For example, previously it was thought that having friendly URL’s was a major point in your search engine success, however today this simply isn’t the case and Google has confirmed that SEO Friendly URL’s are no longer of any benefit. Most SEO software packages were built around this feature and used as a major selling point in the past which is no longer the situtation.
Some prepackaged software touts around link conesus or duplicate content removal. While their software will reduce the duplicate content, did you know this can also be achieved with a free robots.txt file thats been approved for your site or software. A robots.txt file (which most software doesn’t include or create) can keep the search engine bots attention to pages that are important.
Its now 2009 and two things stand true for major SEO factors. Content and relevant back links. Another thing that SEO software won’t be able to deliver to your forums. While our SEO service includes original content for your site that will help tell the search engine spiders what your domain is about. Another important factor your sites search engine success is relevant back links. Be extremely wary of any advice or service that is promising directory submissions as these do not count as relevant backlinks 90% of the time. Our SEO Service will start your site with a natural link building campaign by getting you relevant back links from other sites. Our back link building strategy is 100% safe and approved to increase your sites rankings.
Be wary of any company or service that is promising over night results. Search engine optimization is a long steady process that lasts for the life of your site. One small mistake can lead to months of set backs, so we suggest always using a 100% white hat SEO service.
Latter vBulletin versions 3.6 and beyond come with a new built in feature called the notification system that is awesome for sparking up some conversation or getting new members helped around the site. Whenever someone decides to join a forum, its usually because they have something to share, or are looking to get information from the forum. Most the time, it takes a great deal of debate from that person if your site is worth the hassle of joining, and then learning how to post.
This is what makes the notification system so great, when used with our vBulletin Guest Registration modification you can instantly increase your forums activity ten fold among the new members.
First you’ll want to ensure you have our latest version of guest redirection system installed as it lets you specify a custom forum id to send new members to after registration. Next open up your adminCP and navigate to the notices menu over on the left hand side.
For our first notice we’re going to setup a basic new member notice that has 0 posts, telling them how easy and fun it is to participate in our forums. At the Add New Notice screen enter the following information. You’ll probably want to customize it some to meet your forum needs.
Title: New Member Posting
Notice Html: <p>Welcome to our community {username}, </p>
<p>Thanks for taking the few seconds to sign up, and we hope it was an easy experience for you. Now that you’re a member you can start making posts, and replying to existing ones. Start by making an intro post in this forum telling us a little about yourself.</p>
<p>You’ll find our staff always friendly and willing to help should you have any problems, thanks for registering and we’ll see you around!</p>
<p>Best Regards,<br />
Forum Staff</p>
Active: Yes
Persistent: Yes (personal choice, can be now as well)
Next we’re going to set the options to ensure only members with 0 posts can view the notice. We don’t want to annoy or upset our current members by displaying something not meant for them.
Scroll down, and about half way down the options check the box for “User has never posted”.
Hit Save. Thats all there is to it, your forum will instantly become more personalized for the new member making them feel right at home. We hope you find this guide useful, and you can put it to good use.
The first ever professional version of vBulletin guest redirection professional is now available. SEOvB Guest Redirection Professional System will boost your registration rates by a tremendous amount, and increase your membership conversions!
The system is completely controlled via the adminCP that is easy to turn certain redirects on or off, add your own custom message, enable a fast registration and login block. The Guest Redirection System Professional allows you to choose if you want to use our highly customizable page with a fast registration, or the standard vBulletin registration page.
Our System Currently Supports:
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- One file upload, and one product installation.
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Demo & Support Forums
Making use of <h2> through <h6> tags on your page will build a solid page structure and inform the spiders of the most important content sections, followed by sections which may not be so important. When a crawler comes across content in the <h2> tags it naturally thinks to itself, that whatever is between those tags, the page should generally be about. Concidently when you have a properly written page title for search engine optimization, the h2 tags will also contain many of the same keywords.
Placing the h2 and h3 tags on your vBulletin page is as simple as pie. Unless you can’t cook, but its still fairly simple and straight forward. We assume that you have a basic knowledge of how to modify your templates, and if not, now would be a good time to check out the vBulletin Manual on how to do so.
On your showthread template, after $navbar place the following code:
<div style=”text-align:center”>
<h2 class=”seovb2″>$thread[title_clean]</h2>
<h3 class=”seovb3″>Discuss $thread[title_clean] at $foruminfo[title_clean]</h3>
</div>
For your forumdisplay template place the following code after $navbar:
<div style=”text-align:center;”>
<h2 class=”seovb2″>$foruminfo[title_clean]</h2>
<h3 class=”seovb3″>$foruminfo[description]</h3>
</div>
The final step, is so you can apply styling to the tags, to better match your page style, and hopefully not take as much space up, in your additional CSS definitions place:
h2.seovb2 {font-family: Arial; font-size: 20px; color: #000000; font-weight: bold;}
h3.seovb3 {font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; color: #000000; font-weight: bold;}
By doing this, you’re placing your forum keywords on the page along with the description, and for the showthread pages it should place the thread title and forum above the fold and in a easy location so the cralwers know what the page is about.
Every vBulletin forum that is freshly installed has almost no search engine optimization work done to it. To remedy this and increase your rankings we’re giving you 5 of our best vBulletin search engine optimization tips away for free. We’re also including these tips with all new vBulletin installations that are ordered for a limited time.
- Store your CSS style sheets in the file system. Reduce your page load times, and the amount of code spiders see before hitting your actual content.
- Use a valid vBulletin approved robots.txt file to limit duplicate content
- Ensure that you’re vBulletin settings for messaging and editing options to automatically quote the post title are enabled
- Remove the “Powered by vBulletin” from your vBulletin <title> tags.
- Build and submit a sitemap using the sitemap generator to Google Webmaster Tools.
These five tips will be a solid foundation for improving your vBulletin’s search engine optimization. Remember that content is king, and back links are the queen to further enhance your site’s ranking.
Its completely personal preference to place your forums in either a forum or forums folder of your site, or some people may even use a sub-domain to house their forums. Even depending on your domain name, you may not even require the folder, as your site is only a forum which sometimes work, and sometimes does not.
When you create your site navigation, its good to try to keep different sections or dates divided up as possible as long as it remains organized and structurally sound it will be a huge SEO benefit. The easy cralwers, crawl your content, the more they like you. So when deciding the age old question will forums or forum be best for me, ask your self “Why use either?”
Guests Don’t Know SEO!
The answer to some maybe, because they think internet users are used to simply seeing /forums or /forum to locate a sites bulletin board. However thats clearly not the case, and you can dramatically improve your sites SEO by placing your forums inside a keyword named directory rather than forums. A good example would be that if I had a SEO powered forum, i’d place the content inside a seoforums folder. You may think it looks stupid, or dumb but who cares when you’re reaping the benefits of free search engine optimization from your guests and members.
Example: http://seovb.com/seoforums
Not: http://seovb.com/forums
You may think we’re crazy, you may disagree with us, however look at a bigger picture. Most users aren’t aware of search engine optimization, how it works, and why things are done a certain way, nor will they really care about the location of your forums as long as its still easy to get to or remember. Guests will not know to use keywords when linking to your forum or pages, this is why keywords in the URL are the key to free SEO!
“But your crazy! Keywords in your URL don’t help!”
You are 100% correct, the actual keywords in your URL probably do not give any benefit what so ever, but revisit our previous observation of your sites visitors not knowing a lick about SEO or how to link to your site.
Now however, that you’ve got your keyword placed into your user powered forums, you’ve gained a huge advantage SEO wise over your competitors. Whenever your guests/members create links to your site because they’ve found your article interesting they will no longer be linking to a dynamic URL, or even a URL that doesn’t contain your targeted keywords, instead the thread/pages keywords will be right there in the URL, when search engine spiders crawl and find the link guess what? The person who has posted that link, just got you a good back link, since it will 8/10 times be on a related site, contain your keywords in the link, and spiders will love it!
I still don’t think thats right! Your crazy!
Hey, don’t take our word for it, take our proven SEO strategy for it. When search engines find links, they generally use the anchor text to se what the page should be about. Now that you have your page keywords in your URL, when that user links to your site, the hard work is done! Whenever you get enough links that contain the anchor links text you’ll start to notice traffic for those keywords. Now when someone visits Google, Yahoo or MSN search engines, your vBulletin powered forums will start to increase their rankings for those words! Brilliant!
I want to see some examples of these keyword rich friendly vBulletin URL’s.
- http://seotips4.com/forum/f2/meta-tags-help-2590/Keywords: Meta Tags
- http://seotips4.com/forum/f2/links-article-directories-no-longer-valid-2586/ Keywords: Links, Articles, Directories
Those are just two examples, as you can see, these are the types of links most users are going to create, and you can now see that they have the keywords in them rather than no keywords or other formats.
Hosting a vBulletin forum can be a challenging experience. Finding the right vBulletin safe and approved hosting can prove to be an even bigger challenge but luckily you have our expertise to guide you along the way. We’ve used a wide array of vBulletin hosting in the past, and working on clients site’s we’ve been able to gather information about even more and bring you the best vBulletin approved hosting we’ve found to date.
1. SEOvB.com’s Professional vBulletin Hosting – We provide the vBulletin hosting plans that are specifically designed for hosting vBulletin forum community. The plans were created based on our experience working with hundreds of the vBulletin clients. The hosting plans are grouped by the volume of postings, members and active users.
2. InMotion Web Hosting – InMotion provides its customers with more than enough data storage and transfer to handle their forums, as well as plenty of CPU usage to host your site until you’re getting about 35-40 concurrent connections. Business class hosting starts at $6.95 per month. We do not suggest using personal hosting for vBulletin!
3. HostGator – We’re generally leary of hosting companies that claim to give unlimted space or data, however Host Gator is able to provide the CPU resources needed to run small to medium sized vBulletin forums with no problems. Expect to have to upgrade when you start to get 25 concurrent connections. Plans start at $7.95 monthly
4. BlueHost – Provides reasonable amounts of disk and transfer space for vBulletin users with a little extra in there in case you would need it. Blue Host does charge a setup fee for accounts that don’t prepay for 6 months though, we feel thats a bit odd in today’s world, however it ensures server integrity and spam free space for everyone. Plans start at $9.95 + Setup fee, or $7.95 with no setup fee if you prepay for 12 months.
