what to do with old urls?

vBSEO is up and running on my forums. Now I'm just waiting for spiders to grab my urls. I'm going to grep out googlebot hits from my log files so I can see how effective the spidering is.

Now, what do I do with my old urls? I had set up some poorly written mod_rewritten urls that aren't nearly as clean as vBSEO. Basically, my forum urls looked like this: http://www.hotrodders.com/f21 . And, my thread urls looked like this: http://www.hotrodders.com/t12345.html .

I had gotten a lot of those pages indexed in SE's (thousands). I don't want to lose that traffic, and I don't want to get hit with a duplicate content penalty.

I know that I can do 301 redirects via mod_rewrite so that forum urls like this: http://www.hotrodders.com/f21 get 301'd to urls like this: http://www.hotrodders.com/forum/title-of-forum . But, it doesn't seem feasible to do 301's for thread urls like this: http://www.hotrodders.com/t12345.html to urls like this: http://www.hotrodders.com/forum/titl...ead-12345.html .

Should I keep both url schemes in place, and risk a duplicate content penalty? Or should I abandon the old scheme, and deal with 404's for all my old thread urls?

Hi Jonathan,

Here is a .htaccess directive that you can add to 301 redirect your old static URLs to the new vBSEO CRUs:

Code:

RewriteRule ^t([0-9]+)\.html$ showthread.php?t=$1 [R=301]

This will ensure that your currently indexed (static) threads are redirected & 404s or duplicate content will not become an issue.

Juan

Thanks Juan -- I didn't even consider that. I can just 301 the static thread links back to showthread.php, and the vbseo system will pick them up from there. Extremely cool.

Originally Posted by Jonathan

Thanks Juan -- I didn't even consider that. I can just 301 the static thread links back to showthread.php, and the vbseo system will pick them up from there. Extremely cool.

Absolutely right! Forwarding any of your past statics to their equivalent dynamic URLs will allow vBSEO to take over and do the 301 redirecting to the new static formats.

FYI I forgot to list a .htaccess directive for your old forum statics. Here it is:

Code:

RewriteRule ^f([0-9]+)$ forumdisplay.php?f=$1 [R=301]

NOTE: Actually we are working on a new feature that will allow users to enter old static URL formats in the vBSEO Control Panel, and then have vBSEO do the redirecting automatically. Kind of a "hystoric url rewrite" feature

Juan

Historic url rewrites should be very useful to people.

Any idea how to handle multi-page forum or thread urls that I've previously rewritten?

For example, here's a url for page 726 of my "Engine" forum: http://hotrodders.com/f21-726.html . It's now pointing to page 1 of the Engine forum, rather than page 726. Here's the mod_rewrite line I'm using:

RewriteRule ^f([0-9]+)-([0-9]+)\.html$ /forum/forumdisplay.php?forumid=$1&pagenumber=$2 [R=301,L]

It's going through vbseo, and resolving to this url: http://hotrodders.com/forum/engine/?pagenumber=726


Is there a cleaner way to pass that $pagenumber variable?

Perfect -- thanks Oleg. I think I was accustomed to using $pagenumber from vb2, and vb3 allows either $page or $pagenumber.