SEO Q: Changing forum-script, a very bad idea?

[Emil]

I got a forum that is growing for each day thanks to Google.
I want to switch forum-script from SMF to vBulletin but all my URLs will change.

How does Google handle this? Could I lose all the traffic or will it most likely come back once Google have respidered the site?

[Klen]

Well yes indeed you could experience some kind of penalization due to a lot of missing links,but such penalizations are usualy short time and it recovers after some time.Idealy it would be if you could 301 redirect old links to new ones,but in this case that might be not possible.

[CaptainWolfy]

as KlenTelaris said you can do 301 redirection from old to new links it shouldn't be so hard to do that, and sure you will drop a bit in SERP but after a while you will gain back your old serps ..

[blackmonsters]

Originally Posted by Emil

I got a forum that is growing for each day thanks to Google.
I want to switch forum-script from SMF to vBulletin but all my URLs will change.

How does Google handle this? Could I lose all the traffic or will it most likely come back once Google have respidered the site?

I would do one or more of the following :


1. simply leave the SMF installed and remove the index and have the SMF script
place the canonical link in the header of every page.

Example canonical :

PHP Code:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/> 


But if you are not able to determine the canonical link inside SMF then :

2. Use htaccess addhandler with or without a redirect script.

example :

htacces file :

PHP Code:

AddHandler oldpage .shtml .html .php
Action oldpage /cgi-bin/oldpage.cgi

ErrorDocument 404 /cgi-bin/oldpage.cgi 


Now in the oldpage.cgi, you will have code that will return the correct page and
correct canonical link.


* You want the canonical link because it eliminates the "duplicate content penalty".

The canonical says : "This is the page you requested but the actual URL of
this page is http://something"



So in short : You want both the old and new links to work but without duplicate
content penalty.



* Disclaimer : You can do the same I said before even easier than that
if you are good at htaccess and your script urls differ enough from SMF and VB to be
distinguished in htaccess and then redirected with a 301 error(permanent redirect)


See :
http://www.google.com/support/webmas...&answer=139394

[blackmonsters]

Well, I guess my reply was a massive waste of fucking time.

[AzteK]

Originally Posted by blackmonsters

Well, I guess my reply was a massive waste of fucking time.

it's was a nice effort a+

[Seth Manson]

Post the url here so we can xrumer the fuck out of it.

[$5 submissions]

Originally Posted by Seth Manson

Post the url here so we can xrumer the fuck out of it.

[AzteK]

Originally Posted by Seth Manson

Post the url here so we can xrumer the fuck out of it.

HAHAHAHA

[MovieMaster]

I would pick up a copy of www.vbseo.com as well, and you will se your traffic explode on top of what vbulletin will bring on its own. I have 3 forums and I swear by it!

[d-null]

Originally Posted by blackmonsters

Well, I guess my reply was a massive waste of fucking time.

your reply was very interesting, I didn't realize it was possible this way, and in the past just gave up the old url's and imported the content, I will look at your method a little more out of interest. It might also come in handy when changing a site from a forum to another type of site, thanks for posting it