Quote:
Originally Posted by Emil
I got a forum that is growing for each day thanks to Google.
I want to switch forum-script from SMF to vBulletin but all my URLs will change.
How does Google handle this? Could I lose all the traffic or will it most likely come back once Google have respidered the site?
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I would do one or more of the following :
1. simply leave the SMF installed and remove the index and have the SMF script
place the canonical link in the header of every page.
Example canonical :
PHP Code:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/>
But if you are not able to determine the canonical link inside SMF then :
2. Use htaccess addhandler with or without a redirect script.
example :
htacces file :
PHP Code:
AddHandler oldpage .shtml .html .php
Action oldpage /cgi-bin/oldpage.cgi
ErrorDocument 404 /cgi-bin/oldpage.cgi
Now in the oldpage.cgi, you will have code that will return the correct page and
correct canonical link.
* You want the canonical link because it eliminates the "
duplicate content penalty".
The canonical says : "This is the page you requested but the actual URL of
this page is http://something"
So in short : You want both the old and new links to work but without duplicate
content penalty.
* Disclaimer : You can do the same I said before even easier than that
if you are good at htaccess and your script urls differ enough from SMF and VB to be
distinguished in htaccess and then redirected with a 301 error(permanent redirect)
See :
http://www.google.com/support/webmas...&answer=139394