afraid to commit

ok, im seriously considering a license for one of my forums. but my biggest fear is, if for unknown some reason , i have to revert back to just my vBulletin default install, maybe after all of the search engines have indexed the SEOed pages.

is there anything in place to prevent engines having to re-index those pages if for some reason i was to stop using vbseo? does my concern make sense and is it justified?

eric

Why would you invest for the product and then decide against using it.
I think if this was the case you would have to make some special 301 rules in your ./.htaccess file to let Google know about the new location of these URLs.

Why would you invest for the product and then decide against using it.

its not a matter of deciding against using it. it would not be a decision i would want to make. i can't really even think of a reason i'd be forced to abandon it but im just checking. just want to make sure this is what i should be doing.

Originally Posted by Eric

its not a matter of deciding against using it. it would not be a decision i would want to make. i can't really even think of a reason i'd be forced to abandon it but im just checking. just want to make sure this is what i should be doing.

Hello Eric and welcome to the boards,

Your question is valid and logical . One concern that users have expressed is vBSEO's support for future vBulletin versions for example.

I can tell you that since official launch on September 23, 2005, vBSEO has gotten nothing but stronger. At the moment we are working on a new member's area with license management features, an affiliate/reseller program, an automated checkout process, a robust ticketing system, and several other infrastructure elements to keep up with the growth.

All this to say, the product will continue to evolve and we'll strive to keep everyone happy.

I don't foresee you wanting to remove vBSEO from your forums

However, if (at any point in the future) you would like to uninstall and revert back to your vB dynamic URLs, you can use the following .htaccess directive to 301 your *default* vBSEO thread format to the original vBulletin thread format:

PHP Code:

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


Thank-you for your questions,
Juan

Originally Posted by Juan Muriente

However, if (at any point in the future) you would like to uninstall and revert back to your vB dynamic URLs, you can use the following .htaccess directive to 301 your *default* vBSEO thread format to the original vBulletin thread format:

PHP Code:

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


Thank-you for your questions,
Juan

This is actually a critical question for us. I ran vBSEO for half a day and had to disable it later until I figure out the performance issue we were seeing. So all the URLs people were emailing around from earlier today are now broken.

The php code you show is encouraging for threads, but it won't restore some of the other stuff like links to forums because they don't have an i.d. in them.

I'd hate to be in a situation where 3 years from now we end up having to disable vBSEO for whatever reason and we can do a htaccess thing to restore some URLs but the rest would break on all the pages that link to us.

To be able to have rewrites for those, be sure you include the forumid in your forum url format. Same with users; make sure userid is included.

Then you'll be able to "back out".

Without the forumid it is certainly more difficult; however, you could create 301 redirects for each specific forum display URL.