2
Upgrading to a new forum platform without losing google pagerank or search traffic
Posted by Shoel,
in
Invision Power Board
23 April 2010
·
0 views
traffic pagerank seo upgrade ipb
When I took over PHPTalk.com, it was running an old and rather outdated/terrible forum platform called Simple Machines Forum, or SMF. I quickly decided that it would be necessary to upgrade this in order to provide a better platform for this community, and not to mention make the task of administrating the forum somewhat doable (SMF is not exactly famous for it's extensive admin/moderator features).
The choice eventually fell on Invision Power Board (IPB), a platform on which I have successfully built communities in the past. It is feature rich, CEO-friendly, has a module system for 'hack free' modifications, and it is commercially supported - which means regular and high quality updates. I firmly believe it is the best solution out there, and I wanted this community to have nothing less.
The challenge I faced was that the existing forum had a fairly decent Google PageRank despite not having been maintained for a number of years. It does after all have a lot of content which is highly relevant to the site's topic and domain keyword. Thanks to Google Analytics' extensive statistics, I could also see that we receive quite a lot of traffic through search engines. Both these are very valuable in order to re-build the community, so it quickly became apparent that I would have to be careful to preserve both the PR and Search Engine traffic when upgrading the forum and moving it to a new URL location ("forum" instead of "forums").
A brilliant thing with IPB is that they have put a great amount of care into providing a rock solid conversion-system for potential customers wanting to migrate their data and userbase over to their product. After purchasing a license for their forum, you can download a conversion addon that that is installed by a quick upload and a few mouse clicks. You proceed to type in database details for your existing forum (e.g. SMF or any of the others they support), select a Conversion Id for the old forum (will get back to this), and you are then presented with options on what content you would like to migrate over. This includes selecting new user-groups for the users (based on their old), access permissions, mapping between old and new profile-fields, and pretty much everything else that matters. So, to sum it up, it is overall a very painless process.
When you run the conversion process, IPB stores relevant information associated with the Conversion Id you specified - and here comes the nice part. They also supply a system called "Links" bundled with the Convertors - under a folder called "Tools". This is a script (or set of scripts, depending on forum platform) that takes a few simple configuration options (URL and file-location of the new form, and the mentioned Conversion Id). This is placed in the location of the old forum (in this case it was located at "/forums" - so I installed the new forum as "/forum") - and replaces the Front Controller (e.g. index.php) or all the specific scripts for systems who use multiple (e.g. index.php, forumdisplay.php, album.php, etc). When someone (a person following a link, or a search engine spider) tries to visit content from the old forum, the "Links" solution hooks into the IPB kernel/core, figures out where the corresponding content is located at the new forum, and redirects the visitor to the new URL at the new forum.
But we are not done just yet! IPB also supports so called (Search Engine) Friendly URLs, using a rewrite engine to redirect users from a URL containing classic PHP $_GET paramters (http://example.com/i...methingelse=bar) to more pretty looking URL's in the format "http://example.com/something/foo/somethingelse/bar" instead. Besides being recommended for both SEO and aesthetics, IPB's implementation of this supports a particularly useful feature - called "301" redirects.
When the "Links" system redirect your users from old URL's to your new forum, it will redirect them to the classic showxxxx=x URL format. Under the "Server Environment" settings of your IPB 3.x forum, you can set "Redirect to new friendly URL format" and "Use "301" for friendly URL redirects" (don't forget to enable "Friendly URLs" and add the mod_rewrite expression to your .htaccess). This will immediately redirect visitors to the new and friendly URL format using a 301 "moved permanently" redirect instead of simply forwarding them, thus ensuring that Search Engine Spiders pick up on the permanent URL change and updates the Search Provider's records for future reference. With this enabled, you should see search results gradually starting to display the new URL for your forum/site in search results, as your site gets re-indexed slowly but surely. In the meantime it's not a big deal if they are incorrect, because users end up being served the correct content regardless!
In theory this should allow a pretty much painless transition from the old platform over to IPB, time will show whether it works out in real life. Feel free to add a comment if you have feedback or anything to add!
Copyright © PHPTalk.com 2010 - All rights reserved.
The choice eventually fell on Invision Power Board (IPB), a platform on which I have successfully built communities in the past. It is feature rich, CEO-friendly, has a module system for 'hack free' modifications, and it is commercially supported - which means regular and high quality updates. I firmly believe it is the best solution out there, and I wanted this community to have nothing less.
The challenge I faced was that the existing forum had a fairly decent Google PageRank despite not having been maintained for a number of years. It does after all have a lot of content which is highly relevant to the site's topic and domain keyword. Thanks to Google Analytics' extensive statistics, I could also see that we receive quite a lot of traffic through search engines. Both these are very valuable in order to re-build the community, so it quickly became apparent that I would have to be careful to preserve both the PR and Search Engine traffic when upgrading the forum and moving it to a new URL location ("forum" instead of "forums").
A brilliant thing with IPB is that they have put a great amount of care into providing a rock solid conversion-system for potential customers wanting to migrate their data and userbase over to their product. After purchasing a license for their forum, you can download a conversion addon that that is installed by a quick upload and a few mouse clicks. You proceed to type in database details for your existing forum (e.g. SMF or any of the others they support), select a Conversion Id for the old forum (will get back to this), and you are then presented with options on what content you would like to migrate over. This includes selecting new user-groups for the users (based on their old), access permissions, mapping between old and new profile-fields, and pretty much everything else that matters. So, to sum it up, it is overall a very painless process.
When you run the conversion process, IPB stores relevant information associated with the Conversion Id you specified - and here comes the nice part. They also supply a system called "Links" bundled with the Convertors - under a folder called "Tools". This is a script (or set of scripts, depending on forum platform) that takes a few simple configuration options (URL and file-location of the new form, and the mentioned Conversion Id). This is placed in the location of the old forum (in this case it was located at "/forums" - so I installed the new forum as "/forum") - and replaces the Front Controller (e.g. index.php) or all the specific scripts for systems who use multiple (e.g. index.php, forumdisplay.php, album.php, etc). When someone (a person following a link, or a search engine spider) tries to visit content from the old forum, the "Links" solution hooks into the IPB kernel/core, figures out where the corresponding content is located at the new forum, and redirects the visitor to the new URL at the new forum.
But we are not done just yet! IPB also supports so called (Search Engine) Friendly URLs, using a rewrite engine to redirect users from a URL containing classic PHP $_GET paramters (http://example.com/i...methingelse=bar) to more pretty looking URL's in the format "http://example.com/something/foo/somethingelse/bar" instead. Besides being recommended for both SEO and aesthetics, IPB's implementation of this supports a particularly useful feature - called "301" redirects.
When the "Links" system redirect your users from old URL's to your new forum, it will redirect them to the classic showxxxx=x URL format. Under the "Server Environment" settings of your IPB 3.x forum, you can set "Redirect to new friendly URL format" and "Use "301" for friendly URL redirects" (don't forget to enable "Friendly URLs" and add the mod_rewrite expression to your .htaccess). This will immediately redirect visitors to the new and friendly URL format using a 301 "moved permanently" redirect instead of simply forwarding them, thus ensuring that Search Engine Spiders pick up on the permanent URL change and updates the Search Provider's records for future reference. With this enabled, you should see search results gradually starting to display the new URL for your forum/site in search results, as your site gets re-indexed slowly but surely. In the meantime it's not a big deal if they are incorrect, because users end up being served the correct content regardless!
In theory this should allow a pretty much painless transition from the old platform over to IPB, time will show whether it works out in real life. Feel free to add a comment if you have feedback or anything to add!
Copyright © PHPTalk.com 2010 - All rights reserved.
