Switch to SMF; Will Search Engines Still Find Me

[MtnDon]

This came up in a talk with a friend who I'm trying to convince to switch to SMF.

He's concerned that the change will confuse search engines and mess with his ranking. His ranking is quite high with Google using some fairly generic terms that describe his forum, so that is a valid concern.

His present url to the index page looks something like
hxxp://www.small-widgets.com/forum/
going to a topic it looks something like
hxxp://www.small-widgets.com/forum/8_1316_0.html

My suggestion was to place the SMF forum into the same folder. That would be a constant so at least the search engines would still find his forum. The search engines should be smart enough to start with the basic index page url and sort things out from there.   Is that right?

Thanks to all.

[kat]

If the URL isn't going to change, his ranking should be as-was.

[青山 素子]

Well...

There will probably be some penalty for a huge change. This can be helped by preparing 301 redirects to the new URL schema. Will the old forum data be imported to SMF?

[MtnDon]

yes all current forum data would be run through the SMF converter to all members, topics, etc should all be there.

[青山 素子]

As long as you can match up the IDs between the two, you should be able to use something like mod_rewrite to do a 301 redirect to the new URL format. This will greatly help keep positioning in search results and allow any external links to still work and count toward the new pages.

I'd advise doing a test conversion first and checking rewrites for all the major areas before putting SMF into production.

The bottom line is that it will affect rankings, but if you plan to do the redirects and keep those in place, then that effect will be only temporary.

[kat]

Will the old forum data be imported to SMF?

I'd assumed that to be the case.

Maybe that was a mistake.

Apologies.

[MtnDon]

... and I should have indicated that all the present/old data would be converted to the new SMF format.

Thanks very much

[kat]

Pleasure!

As long as we get there, in the end, all's good.

[Ricky.]

This came up in a talk with a friend who I'm trying to convince to switch to SMF.

He's concerned that the change will confuse search engines and mess with his ranking. His ranking is quite high with Google using some fairly generic terms that describe his forum, so that is a valid concern.

His present url to the index page looks something like
hxxp://www.small-widgets.com/forum/
going to a topic it looks something like
hxxp://www.small-widgets.com/forum/8_1316_0.html

My suggestion was to place the SMF forum into the same folder. That would be a constant so at least the search engines would still find his forum. The search engines should be smart enough to start with the basic index page url and sort things out from there.   Is that right?

Thanks to all.

As 青山 素子 said, using mod_rewrite, you shouldn't get any issue. I have done it many times without loosing traffic and rankings and have done recently. If you are good with mod_rewrite then things would be fine. Just do normal conversion and proper mod_rewrite knowledge, there will be very slight temporary effect but things will be smooth.

Just to clarify a little more, people visiting to old url will be dynamically redirected to new urls as if there is nothing changed.

[Joshua Dickerson]

If you wanted to make the mod_rewrite rules simple, you'd need to keep the same topic ids. You probably would want to keep the same ids all around.