SEO

Hello,

we are in the process of merging a phpBB into our existing forum.

I guess we have to use ImpEx, even if I don't like the way it works. Setting new IDs is never a good idea regarding seo imo.

What can I do to preserve the "old" URLs the phpBB had once?

Thanks,
Lian

Unfortunately, not much...

The only way it would work like that would be if you NEVER deleted a topic. Ever. Including the default "Welcome to phpbb" topic thats auto-posted on install.

I did the same thing, only coming from IPB.... and it took me about 4-5 weeks to get re-indexed.
.... and then the traffic came.
and then google blew up, and the traffic left :(
but the past 2 days, the traffic is working its way back up
I'd say now's the time to do it. google seems to be getting their act back together....

you can 301 redirect your OLD phpbb urls vbulletin showthread urls (wait for a month atleast b4 implementing vbseo)..

sure, if you go through 1 by 1 by hand.... on a large board, this is not feasbale.

impex does save the old id's in the forum, post and thread tables. If you wanted to setup redirects to new thread ids you just need to go in and either change all your tables over so that the ID that vb uses is the old id (UPDATE table SET forumid = oldforumid) or put some code in index.php (or whatever the page is on phpbb that used to display the threads) to look up the new ID and redirect to it.

I did that when I went from ipb to vb

I could probably help you out with the code changes if you want to go that way

Many thanks, I think I'll come back to you.