Completely Changing URL Structure (Moving From phpbb To vbulletin)

[teokolo]

Hi,
I'm considering moving my forum from a modified version of phpbb3 (called phbb-seo) to a new forum. The reason is that this modded version is no longer available for newer versions of phpbb. My current version has reached end of life.

The forum has about 3.000 topics, 20.000 posts, seo-friendly urls automatically generated from topic titles, about 200 visitors per day.

The main problem is that moving to a new software (or simply upgrading to latest version) will completely change url structure. I'll have 3000 new urls conflicting with old ones and it's impossible to find a pattern to map old urls with new ones with 301 redirects. The only way would be working with a spreadsheet and guessing correct associations.

Do you think Google is smart enough to deal with this situation or I'm going to reset traffic to zero?

[Storiale]

Do whatever work is required to match URL from old to new. It will be well worth the effort and you'll never regret it. There are tools, to convert, I'm sure and if you're not fully versed in how to optimally create a direct URL to URL 301 for the entire site, you can ask here and a million other places to find the right answer.

[Swanny007]

Are you sold on switching to vB? vB is a step down in my opinion. There are tons of forums moving away from vBulletin, they've really gone downhill the last few years. I've been using phpBB since 2001 and it's come so far, 3.1 is so much superior to 3.0. If you're going to switch, go to XenForo, although I don't think it's worth the effort. Just find a coder to make a new extension to make your old mods work under 3.1.

What exact features do you want from phpbb-seo? Are we talking meta keywords tag, people friendly URLs, etc? The days of SEO'ing the heck out of stuff like forums has passed in my opinion. People friendly URLs don't matter to search engines. Meta keywords are ignored by search engines. Meta title and description is still useful although Google will ignore them too at times.

phpBB 3.1 has eliminated thousands of duplicate URLs on my forums. Gone are the view=next and view=previous URLs for search bots. Gone are the forum ID in the URL for search bots, etc. They've updated the <title> tag to be more people and SE friendly, etc. 3.1 is a massive step up and honestly the reason phpbb-seo is not compatible is probably because it's made obsolete by all the 3.1 core upgrades.

I've been using 3.1 for about a year and a lot of extensions (formerly mods) have been developed. The phpBB 3.1 upgrade will be a lot easier than switching to a new forum software so you should really think about what you want out of it before you make a drastic change.

[edited by: Swanny007 at 8:12 pm (utc) on Mar 21, 2016]

[lucy24]

it's impossible to find a pattern to map old urls with new ones with 301 redirects

You may not be able to do it directly, but you can probably do it indirectly by working backward from the existing post/thread titles (which I assume you're keeping).
/thread/post >> old URL
/thread/post >> new URL
The question is then whether you can extrapolate the actual thread/post directly from the old URL, or whether you need to do a lookup. 3000 URLs (it's really 20000 isn't it? php/bb uses both topic and post in its complete URL) is obviously too many to hand-code your redirects, but it's definitely not too many for some type of lookup table.

Paradoxically it may be easier to program if the new URLs are completely different from the old ones, because then the server doesn't have to first figure out which is which.

Now, what about internal links within your existing posts? Have you got a way to change those once and for all, or will you have to accept a little collateral damage in the form of ongoing redirects?

[teokolo]

@Swanny007 thank you for your input about vbulletin.
The only feature I want to keep from phpbb-seo is friendly urls. Not because of seo, but because of redirects which will be very hard to do.
Imagine making 3000 redirects from /forum/category/post-title-id to /viewtopic.php?f=12121&t=3223 (or something else).
I know there's an extension on github made to give some compatibility between phpbb-seo (phpbb-3.0) and phpbb-3.1 (it's called usu - Ultimate Seo Url), but it seems unstable and not for production forums.
I think I'll setup a testing environment and try to upgrade to phpbb-3.1 and see if usu is what I need OR if redirects from friendly urls to normal ones is an "easy" task.


@lucy24 I guess I'll need to work directly on database to build the complete list of old urls, the list of new urls and to create a map, the main problem is that migrating to another software will change forum, topic and post id, making the mapping very hard.
Luckily I don't have so many internal links within existing posts, so updating them won't be that hard.

[Swanny007]

For what it's worth, you do not need friendly URLs to rank better in search engines, that's outdated SEO advice (hint: most SEO advice is!). Having high quality content in the forum is a far better recipe for success.

phpBB 3.1 gives cleaner URLs to search bots (& subsequent search users) so it's really a non-issue.

As long as the content is in the database as regular topics right now you are going way overboard on figuring this out. You don't need to work directly in the database, create a new site map, switch forum software, or any of that, that is all a waste of time IMHO.

My advice is to upgrade to phpBB 3.1 but put the right lines in the root .htaccess to do 301 redirects to the correct, clean, new URLs. It would only take a few lines of code. If you haven't already, you should also post what you're trying to accomplish on the phpbb.com support community forum. I really think you're going down the wrong path (doing unnecessary and extra work for little to no gain).

[teokolo]

While making a decision I'm cleaning up the forum. Right now I've deleted about 1000 topics (thin content, useless for users, duplicated) and some forums.
How to deal with 404? Should I simply ignore them or convert to 410? My concert is about future redirects: if I find good rules to automatically redirect from /forum/topic-name-33/post-title-55/ to standard phpBB url (viewforum.php?f=33&t=55) I'll redirect a 404 page to another one..

[lucy24]

404 = "I dunno, can't find it"
301 = "The content has moved; here's the new address"
410 = "This page used to exist but has been intentionally removed; there's no current equivalent"

Stick with the honest response, whichever it may be. Among other reasons, a hard-coded response-- whether 301 or 410-- is easier on your server because it doesn't have to go look for the file (or easier on your CMS because it doesn't have to search its database for the URL).