MyBB Google SEO Plugin Tutorial for MyBB 1.6

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MyBB Google SEO tutorial on how to install on MyBB 1.6.

The MyBB Google SEO plugin is a powerful modification plugin to MyBB which rewrites the URLs to become SEO friendly for search engines and makes a MyBB SEO friendly forum, with it your MyBB forum rankings in search engines will improve very much. The MyBB Google SEO plugin however, can be difficult to install without the proper knowledge of using the htaccess file which is needed to change the URLs. I’ve created a tutorial on how to install the MyBB Google SEO plugin for MyBB 1.6, this tutorial was created using cPanel to manage files. This tutorial is also using MyBB Google SEO 1.1.13 [LEGACY] plugin and MyBB 1.6.4 forum software version, this tutorial may not work correctly if you are not using these versions together. You will need a general knowledge of MyBB and cPanel, but I will try to make this as complete and easy to understand as possible.

1. First, download the MyBB Google SEO plugin.

2. Extract the zip file.

3. Inside the extracted folder, you should see several other files. Archive zip the inc folder to make a inc.zip file.

4. Login to cPanel, click File Manager, go to the root of your MyBB installation and make sure you check the Show Hidden Files (dotfiles) box.

5. Once you’re in the root domain name of your MyBB installation in File Manager, upload the inc.zip file we zipped earlier. Extract it after it finishes uploading, you can also delete the inc.zip file now. The MyBB Google SEO plugin has now been extracted into the correct locations of MyBB (do NOT activate the plugin in your MyBB forum yet).

6. Next we need the correct functions.php file specifically for MyBB Google SEO, a different one is needed for each MyBB version that the functions.php file was changed in. for MyBB 1.6.4, get functions-googleseo-1.6.4.php here.

7. Extract the zip file and you’ll find the functions-googleseo-1.6.4.php file, in File Manager go into the /inc folder and upload this file.

8. In File Manager download the original functions.php file for a backup, then delete it. Rename functions-googleseo-1.6.4.php to functions.php.

9. Last to do now is to upload and modify the htaccess file for the MyBB Google SEO plugin. In the google_seo_1.1.13 folder extracted earlier there is a file called htaccess.txt.example, upload it to the root of your MyBB installation in File Manager.

10. Download the current htaccess.txt file in your MyBB installation and then delete it, rename htaccess.txt.example to htaccess.txt.

11. In File Manager select the Code Editor for the htaccess.txt file and edit it, as we will need to make some changes to it for MyBB Google SEO.

12. Here’s the tricky part:

The screenshot above outlines the parts of the htaccess.txt file you can edit. The ones in red NEEDS to be edited, while the ones in purple are optional. For the ones in red that circles “/MyBB/”, you must change these to your MyBB’s root installation URL. For example, if it’s at www.mywebsite.com, then change “/MyBB/” to just “/”. If it’s at www.mywebsite.com/myforum/, then change “/MyBB/” to “/myforum/”. For the red circle “yoursite/MyBB/” is similar as before. Replace it with “www.mywebsite.com/” or “www.mywebsite.com/myforum/”, wherever your root MyBB installation is. I’ll explain the purple circled areas later, but for now leave them as is. When the changes are complete, save them.

13. Rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess.

14. Time to activate the MyBB Google SEO plugin. Go into Admin CP of your MyBB forum, install and activate the Google SEO plugin.

15. It should say “404, Meta, Redirect, Sitemap and URL are disabled. (Configure)”, click the configure link.

16. Switch Google SEO 404, Google SEO Meta, Google SEO Redirect, Google SEO Sitemap and Enable Google SEO URLs to yes. Save settings.

16. Go back to the plugins page, it should now say “404, Meta, Redirect, Sitemap and URL are enabled.” with a green checkmark image. Congrats, MyBB Google SEO has been successfully installed.

MyBB Google SEO optional features

To further enhance the MyBB Google SEO plugin for search engines, there’s a few adjustments you can make.

Change the MyBB Google SEO URL scheme (advanced users only)

Remember the purple areas in the screenshot of your htaccess file earlier? We can change these to change the URL schemes of your MyBB forum. By MyBB stock default they are like www.example.com/showthread.php?tid=1, or with the MyBB Google SEO plugin www.example.com/Thread-Your-Thread-Title. The URL schemes can be changed from “Thread” to anything you want like www.example.com/Topic-Your-Thread-Title, and the same can be done for Forum, Announcement, User, Calender and Event URL schemes too.

1. Go into File Manager in cPanel again (and again make sure you check the “Show Hidden Files (dotfiles)” box), use Code Editor to edit the .htacess file again.

2. In the purple circled area “Thread”, let’s change this to “topic” instead. Save changes.

3. Go back to Admin CP in MyBB, then to Configuration > Google SEO URL. Under the Thread URL scheme option, change it from “Thread-{url}” to “topic-{url}”. Save settings.

This is how we change the URL schemes, you can change them in your htaccess file to anything you want, but keep it short, and make sure the “-{url}” is always after your newly defined URL scheme in your Google SEO URL settings.

This concludes my MyBB tutorial for installing the MyBB Google SEO plugin. If you have any questions or problems installing the MyBB Google SEO plugin to your MyBB forum, please feel free to leave a comment.

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