SMFPacks SEO Pro 2.5.0 is out

SEO Pro 2.5.0 is available now in your client area, and it's our biggest update in years. It gets your forum ready for how people search today: new topics reach search engines in minutes, Google can show your topics in its forum results, and you decide what AI crawlers can do with your content.

It also includes a full security review, so we recommend that everyone update.

What's new

• IndexNow instant indexing. New topics and replies are sent to Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam and Yep as soon as they're posted, so they don't have to wait for the next crawl. On SMF 2.1, edited and removed topics are sent too, so search results stay current.
• Google "Discussions and forums" results. Topic pages now include DiscussionForumPosting structured data, which Google uses to feature forum threads in its search results.
• llms.txt for AI tools. Your forum can publish an llms.txt file that summarizes its public boards and newest topics for AI assistants. It updates itself, and you can edit the template.
• AI crawlers control. Choose how AI training crawlers and AI assistants are treated: allow them, disallow them in robots.txt, or block them from the forum entirely.

Sitemap pings to Google and Bing have been removed, since both search engines stopped accepting them. IndexNow replaces them for Bing.

Security and fixes

This release fixes several security issues found in a full review of the mod, so please update even if you don't need the new features. It also fixes many bugs, including:

• XML sitemaps could list private boards and unapproved topics.
• Pretty URLs could open the wrong topic or profile, and 301 redirect rules could loop.
• Meta descriptions, keywords and image optimizations now work on servers without .htaccess, such as nginx.
• PostgreSQL errors in the sitemaps, tag cloud and install.
• Installing no longer replaces an existing robots.txt or empties .htaccess.

The full list is in the changelog included with the package.