Print Page - Losing traffic after converting as old urls throw a 404 error

Title: Losing traffic after converting as old urls throw a 404 error
Post by: saltkottai on May 31, 2012, 08:45:16 AM

Hi,

I recently converted my phpbb3 forum into SMF. Everything went fine, but the old URLs could not be converted. I have lot of important indexed results in search engines and they are throwing up 404 errors.

I have pretty urls installed, not good at .htaccess. Can someone help please?

Regards,
VK

Title: Re: Losing traffic after converting as old urls throw a 404 error
Post by: Kindred on May 31, 2012, 08:54:52 AM

pretty urls does not help seo at all.

unfortunately, there is no good way to match your old phpbb urls to the new smf urls, so the best thing that you can probably do is to match the phpbb design and bounce everything to index.php. That will stop the 404s, but it won't help with the previously indexed results. You'll have to wait to be rescanned for results under SMF.

Title: Re: Losing traffic after converting as old urls throw a 404 error
Post by: saltkottai on May 31, 2012, 01:03:20 PM

Thanks for the suggestion! Now I fee like have done a big mistake. :-\

Can you guide me as to how to match the phpbb design and redirect them to index.php.

Thanks,

Title: Re: Losing traffic after converting as old urls throw a 404 error
Post by: Tony Reid on May 31, 2012, 01:30:13 PM

This might help you ... http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=170959.0

Title: Re: Losing traffic after converting as old urls throw a 404 error
Post by: Kindred on May 31, 2012, 01:34:27 PM

nice, Tony... good find.

Title: Re: Losing traffic after converting as old urls throw a 404 error
Post by: saltkottai on June 01, 2012, 11:46:28 AM

Good news. The fix given in that link worked for me very well, now old posts are being directed to new one.

HURRRAY!!!!! THANKS A TON! GUYS!

Simple Machines Community Forum

SMF Support => Converting to SMF => Topic started by: saltkottai on May 31, 2012, 08:45:16 AM