Move forum to new system and not lose my Google ranking/results?

[Sunflux]

I get a huge number of search referrals from Google each month, many of them heading to posts in my forum. However I soon plan on making some changes to that forum system - which is written in-house - and since those changes will ideally involve a new path/keyword structure (to simplify things), I'm wondering how best to do this.

As I see it, my options are:

1) Just abandon the old structure, lose my referrals, and hope they pick up the new system soon enough.

2) Create a program that will redirect all requests from the old URLs to completely new ones. How will this affect the crawlers?

3) Create a "wrapper" for the new system so that it works completely in the footprint of the old one - meaning no redirects or URL changes on anything that I care about the links to. This involves more work, and sort of leaves me stuck in the past (at least in terms of an ugly URL structure), but if #2 would have an adverse affect on my indexed pages I'd rather do this.

Any suggestions?

[dazzlindonna]

If possible, #2 is your best choice, using a 301 redirect from the old post urls to the new ones.

[Sunflux]

Thanks for the feedback -

Would you happen to know what code to add manually to a header declaration for 301 status?

[Brett_Tabke]

I would go with hard coded redirects from the old urls to the new urls via apache.

I have been with the same situation for 6 years running here. I have wanted to switch away from the "/forum30/" system to "/google/" for years. I have resisted the urge to do so because of the situation you describe.

[Sunflux]

In the end I've decided to go half and half (which will allow me to work the way I want - for now - and will hopefully have no negative impact on referrals).

For the important part - forum content - I've written a program that takes the place of an old forum directory name, and using Apache's "pathinfo" feature I'm stripping out the old directory structure, program name and keywords, reformatting that information into a completely new structure, and then calling the new program internally. So, all URLs are exactly the same with no redirects, even though absolutely everything else is different under the hood.

The parts that don't rely so much on search referrals is now under a completely new directory/keyword structure, however I'm still catching any requests to the old URLs, reformatting them fully to the new system, and then using a 301 redirect.

Since I've made such drastic changes to things Apache's built-in redirects wouldn't be enough for my needs (but I've used them in the past for simpler things).

Oh, and for my header (I print headers manually) it looks like all I needed to add is:

Status: 301 Moved Permanently

Verifies fine with the online header checkers.

Maybe one of these days I'll be brave enough to make a completely clean break from the past... but to be honest I don't think many *users* care all that much over directory structure or how pretty the Address bar looks, I think it's more a concern of us perfectionists! :-)

[Brett_Tabke]

Your visitors won't care when they visit the site, but they will care greatly if they intend to link to you.

One study showed that people will link to a static url 50 to 1 over a dynamic url.