Regarding the future of DBSEO

Fillip H.

Staff member
Owner
Developer
Customer
Hey all,

Recently, we've had a few questions regarding the future plans of DBSEO and what direction we want to take it in.

As you may know, the world of SEO is constantly changing, and search engines don't tend to announce their plans ahead of time. For that reason, we'll have to be reactive more so than proactive when we update DBSEO.

That being said, there are still features we can (and will) add that don't necessarily depend on SEO rules, and I'd like to elaborate on a few of those here.


Content Relevant SEO Titles

Currently, thread / blog / article titles are determined by the user. As we all know, users don't always write the best titles. A thread titled "Question" in the forum "Software & Hardware" is not very descriptive.

To increase human readability, and also the relevance of your titles, we intend to create a function where you can optionally replace these titles with titles generated via keywords found in your content; the thread will be scanned for keywords and if they show up in the original post, a title will be created around them. Your keyword database will originally be manually made by you, but options to have it build up automatically with words commonly used in titles will also be made available, along with exclusion options to make sure undesirable words are left out of URLs.
You will be able to define a list of keywords that are important, and prioritise them even further with three different priority tiers, and these keywords will be added to the title of the content in a manner you choose.

As a result, your titles will appear much more relevant to both users and search engines, thereby increasing their ranking.


URL Rewrite History

Currently, if you change the URL format in some way (making certain URLs more human-readable, or adding ID displays to improve performance), all old URLs will either count towards duplicate content, or flat out not work depending on the extensiveness of the changes made.

Both these scenarios are sub-optimal, so we will be introducing URL Rewrite History, which will store a list of all previous URLs for a specific piece of content. That way, if we come across a URL that would normally generate a 404, we can quickly check it against this list of URLs and if we find a match, redirect to the new version of the URL.

As a result, you will be free to change your URL formats (for instance, in preparation for moving to vB5) without experiencing any significant loss of search engine rankings.


Social Sharing Integration

Search engine rules change, but social media is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Currently, you are limited in the number of ways you can share your content with social media networks (or allow your users to show off their content on their own social media profiles).

We intend to make social sharing easier by integrating social sharing buttons, with full control given to the admin over what social sharing buttons go where (if any at all).

With all signs point towards search engines prioritising content found on social media, enabling your users to share their content can have benefits beyond simply your content being viewable on someone's profile.


Persistent SEO Titles

Currently, SEO URLs are re-generated every time you load a page. This is entirely sub-optimal for performance, as it involves multiple string modification functions being called, all of which add that little extra time to the processing of the page.

We plan to address this by permanently storing the SEO titles after they're first generated, allowing us to skip all that processing when generating your pages and URLs.

As a result, repeat visits of pages should speed up.


Cache Integration

Currently, a lot of database lookups are needed for pages with many URLs. While database queries are often very quick, if there's enough of them they all add up to extra time processing the page. For busy forums, the same information is fetched for the same threads, and the same data is returned (after all, once they've been posted, it's significantly more likely that thread titles have not changed when loading the thread list, than that they have changed).

We plan to address this by working with the vBulletin cache system as configured in config.php - you will need to take no extra steps to enable caching when we implement this feature in DBSEO.

As a result, repeat visits of pages should speed up significantly.


If you have any additional features you would like to see added, feel free to post them here :)

Discuss this news here.
 
Back
Top