[Bellinis]

Hi all!

Pretty soon I will make a switch from my old forum (ubb.threads) to vbulletin. The subject of our (2 y/o) Dutch forum is "the Czech Republic". Currently our website is pretty well ranked in Google. We have 39.000 indexed pages and a pagerank of 4 (which could ofcourse be better ).

My big question now is:

• Which steps should I take to make the switch to vbulletin as smooth as possible?
  All the currently indexed URL's will become invalid, so I need to find some way to guide my visitors to the new location of the post they where looking for. A mod_rewrite rule is (besides being very complex to me) probably impossible to make because of the very big changes.
  What else can I do?
• Is there anything else I should keep in mind before opening my new vb forum? (once Gold is out, I'll surely install T2DMan's SEO tips)
  Any help very much appreciated

PS, sorry for my bad english, I'm dutch

Cheers,

Bellinis
http://www.tsjechie.net/forum < the live (ubb.t) board
http://www.tsjechie.net/board < the test (vbulletin) board

[T2DMan]

And Google has not cached too many of the ubb url's either.

Looks rather complicated to send them all to the correct url's in vBulletin.

Personally, I would do a htaccess 301 redirect from all url's in the old forum, to the root url of the new forum.

Then apply the vbseo url rewrite, and get me to help with the onpage SEO of your forum. vbseo url rewrite - pm me for details.

And the new version of the vBulletin Google sitemap program that I will releasing shortly.

[Bellinis]

Hi T2DMan,

Thank you for your quick reply!

"And Google has not cached too many of the ubb url's either"
What does that mean?

Writing an URL redirect to send my visitors to the corresponding vbpost is probably indeed very complicated or impossible.
Wouldn't it be a good idea to send them to a customized vb search page where I can explain why the link is broken and that they can use the search? If I just send them to the root of the forum like you propose, they'll have no idea where they have 'landed' and what to do next. (most of my visitors have only low/average computer skills.. )

I definately would like to implement the vbseo url rewrite and the onpage SEO of my forum. After gold comes out, I hope you'll still have some time to guide me a little

Thank you very much so far!

[T2DMan]

"And Google has not cached too many of the ubb url's either"
What does that mean?

Do this search on Google - see how very few have got caches on the pages, and the rather long url's.

pm'ing you re vbseo

[Neutral Singh]

Just checked out google and now its says: Resultaten 1 - 4 van circa 97.400 pagina’s in het Nederlands

How come all of a sudden the no of indexed pages jumted by 60000? I am curious.

Thanks