Hello - Hoping to Overcome SEO "Challenges"

I'm Dixie. Hello!

I'm new to serious SEO, but have a rudimentary understanding of seo from working as a web designer. I just took over site and fourm, and the transition time was messy and VERY hard on SEO.

As a result, I've got a number of SEO problems that I'm hoping to use vbSEO to help address. So nudges in the right direction to investigate are much appreciated!

The most significant is that forum content has been indexed at different locations. (I know that's bad...)

• domain.com/bb/
  (for several years)
• otherdomain.com/testfolder/
  (avail. a few days)
  
• XX.XX.XX.XX/new-foldername/
  (ip-based, for abt 6 months)
• domain.com/new-foldername/
  (with vbseo now, same ip, since Christmas)

My vbSEO is giving me linkbacks from threads in the IP-based address scheme. And there are plenty of messy links in the forums themselves because of all this moving, plus a lot of broken smileys (that I might use replacement variables to fix those, I suppose).

I am thinking I need to figure out a redirect for my .htacess so the search engines can get it corrected and fix the broken links in the board that way.

Then, once I figure out the forum SEO, I can also figure out how to fix the site SEO from a total rebuild. I did set up the new site to be as SEO-friendly as I knew how to, though. And I used some ideas I got from looking over vbSEO.

Anyway, that's my "seo story." I figure it will take a bit for me to learn the ropes, but as long as I keep working on it, I'll get there.

Are all of the old versions still online?

It sounds like you'll need to add a .htaccess redirect in each of the old versions that are still online.

Once these are no longer accessible, vBSEO + our sitemap will help to repair the impact.

no, that's just the indexing history.

the ip is the same ip that the current forum resides on, though.

Ok - so it's best to simply put a .htaccess redirect in place to redirect the IP based URL to the domain based URL (in case it's not already done like that).

Then you'll just have to rely on vBSEO + our sitemap to notify the search engines of the correct locations of all pages, and naturally allow the old versions to fall out of the SERPS over time.

ok, thanks for the advice.