Losing traffic after converting as old urls throw a 404 error

[saltkottai]

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

[Kindred]

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.

[saltkottai]

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,

[Tony Reid]

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

[Kindred]

nice, Tony...  good find.

[saltkottai]

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!