SEO

We're migrating an old forum with good traffic and good Google referrals from a different platform to VB with VBSEO. The old forum had a SE friendly archive we'd created at:
www.forum.com/TopicIndex
This page redirects to www.forum.com for browsers with JavaScript on as do all the pages in the index. So visitors don't see it. The SE friendly pages in the archive are stripped of all ads, extraneuous forum and site navigation, etc. They're simply subjects, posters, post bodies, post dates, and replies.

Each page of the forum has a hidden link to www.forum.com/TopicIndex so crawlers find it easily.

When we migrate to VB and VBSEO, we plan to use the Google sitemap in VBSEO. Should we continue to use a hidden SE friendly archive like this too (using VB's built in archive generator?) or will the VBSEO google sitemap completely replace the need for it? (Yes, I know not all crawlers use sitemaps. No one else sends us enough traffic for me to worry about other search engines.) Is there likely to be any period of ranking or Google referral loss while Google switches to indexing us via the SiteMap instead of the old archive? FYI, we have about 225k posts including replies, 70k topics.

Thanks in advance for any opinions or advice on this.

The archive is useless with vbseo. It should be removed entirely for best SEO.

That said, the sitemap is different from the archive. one is an XML schema (sitemap) one is a webpage (archive).

Thanks Brian! That was going to be my guess but it's nice to hear it confirmed by someone who knows!

Delete this post, please.

Not sure why MadK wanted his posted deleted but it had pointed to an SE friendly archive here on VBSEO Forums at:
http://www.vbseo.com/sitemap/

It looks to me like VBSEO forums site uses both the VB SE friendly archive (http://www.vbseo.com/sitemap/) AND the VBSEO XML sitemap (whereever that is). Should that be considered best practice?

They link to the original content for threads.

At the end of the day... where do you want visitors to show up? on your forum with your branding and ads, or on some obsecure 1992-style 'list'.

i highyl suggest removing it completely. vB should never even have made the thing.