Queries about vB to xF conversation and it's impact on SEO

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Khaleal

Active member
Hello!

I am the owner of a vBulletin4 forum (classic) with about 30k of threads and 300k of posts.
After the rubbish that IB lately introduced (vBulletin5) I'd say that I will never upgrade! And because they have no reason to continue the development on vBulletin4 I would seriously look for alternatives.
Lets be honest! Both xenForo and IPB are better than vBulletin! They offer some great futures that vBulletin doesn't offer with great performance over vBulletin.
I started to test out IPB, it looks cool and funny and provides a wide range of add-ons and skins that beat xF's ones (even their default style is usable for a professional forum unlike xF's)! their pricing is a bit more expensive than xF (the basic fees) while the renewal fees are the double! Anyway, the pricing isn't an issue for me.
After that, I started to test out xF, the first thing I've noticed is the performance, in fact, it's incredibly fast! I liked the alerts function and how PMs are being displayed. something bad to mention about xF is it's skin structure. it's very basic and not professional, and the professional skins made by 3rd parties are quit few and can't be compared to those for IPB!
That was a small review and compensation between IPB and xF. Lets now go to the real subject :)
The real problem of the conversation (to xF or to IPB) is that about 92% from my visitors come from search engines! so, SEO is the most important side for me! especially that I got the first results with many good keywords which took me a very long time to get.
I've seen some reviews about converting vBs to IPB and most of the writers mentioned that they noticed a huge drop in their search engines traffic. that's why I came here to xenForo and not to IPB.
My question is, what is going to happen with my daily 30k+ of unique visitors?! and what will happen to my rankings with the good keywords mentioned above? I have a huge number of threads with PR4+ what will happen with them?
But please, before you reply, I don't need a "calm down xF SEO is good" replies! I would like to see real stories about conversations from vB to xF and it's impact on their traffic. it would be good if the stories are provided with traffic reports showing the month when the forum was converted.
BTW, I've used vBulletin without vBSEO and have the standard URLs (forumdisplay.php and showthread.php URLs)

A quick additional question: Does xF provide a converter from vBulletin 4.1.11 to the latest xenForo release?

I am so sorry for the very long thread, but I am really concerned about my forum's future after the conversation.
Thanks in advance to those members will reply with their stories (and even for who won't ;)) and I am also sorry for any English mistakes, I am not a native speaker :)
 
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Khaleal said:
Do you mean you didn't redirect the old vB links to xF's? This was a bad decision in my opinion!
Click to expand...
There was no vBSEO redirects at the time i converted.. It was a matter of necessity.. Of course i was worried about google but then again it was far more important to get a piece of software that wasnt riddled with bugs and delivered on its promises..
 
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VonDoom said:
There was no vBSEO redirects at the time i converted.. It was a matter of necessity.. Of course i was worried about google but then again it was far more important to get a piece of software that wasnt riddled with bugs and delivered on its promises..
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I think if it was redirected correctly you had saved time! after converting without redirecting, all links were broken, and Google considered your site as new one + it may gave you minus for the 404 pages. anyway, the most important thing in life is the happy endings :)
BTW bro, are the redirects available now? I have another average forum that uses vBSEO and I may consider converting it to xenForo also.
 
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Khaleal said:
I think if it was redirected correctly you had saved time! after converting without redirecting, all links were broken, and Google considered your site as new one + it may gave you minus for the 404 pages. anyway, the most important thing in life is the happy endings :)
BTW bro, are the redirects available now? I have another average forum that uses vBSEO and I may consider converting it to xenForo also.
Click to expand...
I believe you can find the redirect script for vBSEO in the archives here.. Dont quote me though when it came out my sites where already migrated to XF so i didnt pay much attention to it.
 
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VonDoom said:
I believe you can find the redirect script for vBSEO in the archives here.. Dont quote me though when it came out my sites where already migrated to XF so i didnt pay much attention to it.
Click to expand...
I aware that I can redirect vBSEO URLs to the standard vBulletin URLs and then use the Redirection addon of xenForo. But this is not a wise idea! First of all, it will double the response time because it's been redirected twice, in addition to that, it will destroy the PR and rankings of your pages, since the original links (before xF migration) are being redirected to vBulletin standard URLs and not to the end URLs (xF's URLs).
 
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We are using the Non-hierarchic .html type URLs using IDs.
This is the htaccess code used to redirect from vBSEO URLs to standard URLs:
Code: 
Thread Paging: RewriteRule thread([\d]+)-([\d]+).html showthread.php?t=$1&page=$2 [NC,L]
Thread: RewriteRule thread([\d]+).html showthread.php?t=$1 [NC,L]
Forum Paging: RewriteRule forum([\d]+)-([\d]+).html forumdisplay.php?f=$1&page=$2 [NC,L]
Forum: RewriteRule forum([\d]+).html forumdisplay.php?f=$1 [NC,L]
And I am planing to use xF's friendly URLs with no content from titles in the URLs. for example
Code: 
example.com/xf/threads/1234/
example.com/xf/forums/12/
where 1234 is the thread id and the 12 is the forum id.
 
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I imagine this would work.
Code: 
RewriteRule thread([\d]+).html threads/$1/ [NC,L]
RewriteRule thread([\d]+)-([\d]+).html threads/$1/page-$2 [NC,L]
RewriteRule forum([\d]+).html forums/$1/ [NC,L]
RewriteRule forum([\d]+)-([\d]+).html forums/$1/page-$2 [NC,L]
Please correct me if I am missing something...
 
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sadikb said:
You need to take a look here

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/redirects-for-vbseod-urls.5098/
Click to expand...
I toke a look here before, and this is not what I need. The method explained here is to redirect vBSEO URLs to the standard vBulletin URLs, and then redirect the standard URLs to xF URLs. This is not a good idea to have two 301 redirects in order to redirect one page to another page..
Please take a look to my reply to vonDoom
I aware that I can redirect vBSEO URLs to the standard vBulletin URLs and then use the Redirection addon of xenForo. But this is not a wise idea! First of all, it will double the response time because it's been redirected twice, in addition to that, it will destroy the PR and rankings of your pages, since the original links (before xF migration) are being redirected to vBulletin standard URLs and not to the end URLs (xF's URLs).
Click to expand...
 
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BTW, This code worked for me :D It redirected all vBSEO URLs to xF's URLs without even using the redirection script.
Code: 
RewriteRule thread([\d]+).html threads/$1/ [NC,L]
RewriteRule thread([\d]+)-([\d]+).html threads/$1/page-$2 [NC,L]
RewriteRule forum([\d]+).html forums/$1/ [NC,L]
RewriteRule forum([\d]+)-([\d]+).html forums/$1/page-$2 [NC,L]
 
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We converted from vB4+vBSEO in December last year and the traffic is yet to cross the levels it got earlier. The pageviews are down (maybe because XF uses lot of AJAX) and as a result our income from advertisements has gone down too. I'm not quite sure how long will it take to recover it completely.
 
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TheBigK said:
We converted from vB4+vBSEO in December last year and the traffic is yet to cross the levels it got earlier. The pageviews are down (maybe because XF uses lot of AJAX) and as a result our income from advertisements has gone down too. I'm not quite sure how long will it take to recover it completely.
Click to expand...
Sorry to hear that... BTW, how much was the page-views drop rate? it's really important for me since I use CPM networks, and less page views can be translated into less revenue.
 
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TheBigK said:
Pageviews immediately went down 50% and then began recovering.
Click to expand...
Thanks for sharing your experience. Can you please better describe the drop? do pageviews only dropped? or it dropped with the traffic drop? I am asking this question since a traffic drop will for sure affect the pageviews..
BTW, what about now? did it recovered? what is the drop rate now?
 
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