[kanaloa]

We'd planned to make the switch in February, but Google got ahead of us and starting indexing this new forum faster than we expected. So we've officially set up the 301's (permanent redirects) to bring all topics and posts from the old /forum/ directory to the corresponding post here in the /forums/ directory.

To clue you in to how this works and why it's important. A 301 essentially is a status response in the eyes of Google and other search engine bots. It tells them the page has moved to a new location, thus preserving the pages page-rank, etc. The alternative is deleting the old page which gives a 404, or page not found. This results in the old page being dropped from the rankings and the new page then has to both be found and re-ranked over time. The 301 is definitely the way to go.

Here's how it works to redirect OLD forum topics to the NEW forum in three simple steps:

1.) The old forum URLs are 301's to the equivalent viewtopic.php page here in the /forums/ directory.
2.) The viewtopic.php page is then 301'd to the SEO (search engine optimized) page here in the /forums/ directory. You may notice topic titles actually appear IN the url. This takes a special mod.
3.) The final SEO page is what Google should be indexing (and/or replacing the old pages with).

Code: Select all

URL=http://www.pronetworks.org/forum/about104776.html
   Result code: 301 (Moved Permanently)
   New location: http://www.pronetworks.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=104776

URL=http://www.pronetworks.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=104776
   Result code: 301 (Moved Permanently)
   New location: http://www.pronetworks.org/forums/upgrading-my-computer-using-same-hard-drive-t104776.html

URL=http://www.pronetworks.org/forums/upgrading-my-computer-using-same-hard-drive-t104776.html
   Result code: 200 (OK)

[Grav!ty]

I just tried a few on the "old" forum and it's working great

[kanaloa]

Great. Hopefully the post URL's will also be updated to the new format by tonight. We'll still plan to shut that forum down in Feb as previously discussed. And we'll be archiving it for staff.