Killing off vanilla forum, what to do with redirect?

[JanHoos]

Hello everyone!

In August I switched over to Xenforo from a Vanilla forum. Unfortunatly I havent been able to wrap my head around redirecting the Vanilla content to the Xenforo topics. They have been imported, but use different id numbers.

Currently I have a lot of 404 errors (4000) in webmaster tools that I want to "fix". Right now my only solution is to kill off the Vanilla forum and send Google 410 reports. In my research this evening I encountered a report of someone on here, who said people where still finding the 404 links from his old forum several months or even years after his switch.

My question is; how do I set-up my .htaccess file? I want to tell google, that the url:
/forum/andeverythingfollowingit is dead and should be dead.

But I also want to let my users who may have /forum/ as a favorite to redirect that to /community/

Currently I'm running this:
Redirect /forum/ /community/

But as soon as you put something behind /forum/, that gets taken to /community/ and ends up presenting another missing page.

I'm hoping someone can help me with this conundrum!

 

[Robust]

They have been imported, but use different id numbers.

You will need a redirect script. None exist for Vanilla so you will need to get custom development.

 

[fly]

From my (limited) understanding of SEO, Google and friends figure this stuff out pretty quickly. Your only real issue will be saved and internal links from posts.

 

[JanHoos]

Thanks guys, I know I need a custom script. I gave up on linking the old content to the new forum.

I could use some help with a .htaccess code that tells google, everything related to mydomain.nl/forums/andeverythingthatgoeshere is gone

I tried one morning making it work, but could not manage. I only found codes that gave a 301 code instead of 410.

@fly Thats what I thought as well. In my quest to fix this I came across a few webmasters that said that the missing content was still linked in google for several months. When they used a 410 code they fixed it much faster.