Switching forum software - 301 redirects?

[van28]

Hi everyone

I'm working on a successful Wordpress site that also has a forum attached. The forum currently uses YAF forum software, which requires Windows hosting.

The site owner wants to switch to Linux hosting. This is not a problem for WP, but it does mean that we'll need to transfer the forum to Xenforo or something similar that runs on Linux. We're OK with the technical side of this, but we're worried about the SEO implications.

The URL for every forum post (more than 50,000 of them) is going to change during this transfer. It seems completely impractical to 301 each of those, so should I just 301 the URLs that have inbound links? Also, what is google's algo going to think when we suddenly have ~50,000 404s?

Many thanks in advance!

J

[DistanceLC]

I would definitely avoid leaving a bunch of URLs as 404s. Even though it would be time consuming I would really try to 301 redirect all of the old pages to the most relevant current page. That would definitely be the best long term move. If you really can't do that you can 301 redirect all of the old forum pages to the new forum. Instead of redirecting to the most relevant post you can put them to the beginning directory of the new forum so at least they aren't receiving a 404 and can hopefully search for their issue there. If you do leave thousands of URLs with 404 errors I would continuously check Google and Bing Webmaster Tools for crawl errors. The webmaster tools will identify URLs they have crawled and found issues with and at that time I would just start fixing them one by one and redirecting to the most relevant URL. That way, over time, the URLs will eventually be corrected. Hope this helps.

[van28]

Hi Jennifer

Thanks for your thoughts. As I said this is a 50,000 post forum so I definitely won't be adding 301s for all of them.

I think this is what we'll do:

• Use OSE and the google 'site:' operator to identify the most valuable posts in the forum and 301 redirect them to the the new URL for that post
• set up a general 301 redirect to redirect all other URLs to the forum homepage '/forum/'

If anyone has any other thoughts, I'd love to hear them!

J

[Travis_Bailey]

Run your site through SEM Rush. It's generally pretty accurate if you need a better understanding of what pages draw traffic and for which queries. After that, it's a good idea to use your analytics tools to identify pages that draw traffic.

One really good link may be driving a ton of traffic to a specific page, but it may not necessarily rank very well. The site might lose a significant amount of referrals due to that link. So make sure to check where your referral sources go as well.

When all of that is said and done, it's time to look at links. Use a few different sources such as Webmaster Tools (Google and Bing), Majestic SEO, Ahrefs and OSE. Majestic and Ahrefs are the favorites, as far as percentage of links and freshness.

When you have the Keep and Cull list, make sure to redirect the keepers to relevant pages. If the page was about donuts, send it to the new donuts page. Don't send it to the bagels page. Google dislikes that. Blanket redirects are generally sub-optimal.

As for the culled pages, you might try to offer a useful 404 page. Something that helps them find something similar to the topic of the page that went away. When all of the dust clears, 410 the culled pages. Alternately, you can skip straight to a 410 if you're only worried about bots wasting crawl budget on a bunch of 404 results.