Hi,

I took over a forum a couple of months ago, and in an attempt to bring the technology into the 21st century I think I've killed it.

It was running IPB and in my enthusiasm I upgraded to VBulletin swiftly followed by VBSEO over the top. All my results are now supplemental, so I'd just like to make sure I'm doing all I can to get back in the normal results.

All the old ipb forums have (index.php?showforum=xxxx) have been 301 redirected to the homepage.

All the old ipb threads have (index.php?showtopic=xxxx) have been 301 redirected to the homepage.

I've redirected to the homepage as the IPB transfer to VBulletin kills your keys. I'm also running the google sitemap plugin for VBSEO and getting crawled daily. Do I just sit this out?

Cheers.

If I was you I would not 301 redirect the old urls. Google has yet to prove to me that they can handle 301 redirects correctly and properly remove the old entries. I still have indexed pages that are years old showing up in google serps yet these pages are 301 redirected. When I changed my url structure last I let the old pages go 404 so that tells Google to drop them from their index.

Do I turn something off in vbseo to ensure a 404?

"File Not Found" requests handling?

Make sure this is set to Send 404 HTTP code

Hmmm... Doesn't seem to do anything. Click this link:

forums.civicland.com/index.php?showtopic=2451

It goes to the homepage, but shows the old url in the url bar.

By all accounts this doesn't work because I've got index.php in my url.

Ah yea that wouldn't. I don't know how to force a 404 error page on those links then....

The guys at vbseo sussed it. Pretty simple really. They re-directed the ?showtopic url to a page that doesn't exist. This gives a 404 to the browser. Everything looks OK in httpwatch as well.

Good deal