Would XF Support Custom Urls Exactly Like vBSEO?

Neutral Singh

Well-known member
I have used vBSEO's customized url schemes on my forum for years now, which creates these beautiful static urls. There are some presets also available that you can choose from the vBSEO menu...

Having done this for years, it gives me goose bumps to migrate to XF as i will loose all the page ranks and linkbacks and what not?

I was wondering how XF is going to deal with this problem? i would love to migrate but i do not want to loose my thousands of static urls in search engines... Would it be possible to write some kind of rewrite rules within the XF interface so that my old forum urls remain the same as i do not rather can not afford to loose my years of hard work.

Please advice...

Thanks
 
It's not possible to have the same URLs. Aside from the formats not being supported, it is not possible to guarantee that all of the IDs will be the same.

Because of the configurability of vBSEO's URLs, there is no cure-all. vBSEO URLs need to be rewritten to the standard vB showthread.php, etc URLs; these rules will need to be configured based on your URL options. You can then use a tool to 301 redirect to the correct XF URL.

Note that URLs without IDs may be quite hard to rewrite (particularly for members).
 
I was still hoping for expansion of the URL rewrite capabilities of XF, but I guess there will be no official support for custom URLs. This may turn out to be the biggest stumbling block and may keep me from switching unfortunately.
 
i dont really think xenforo is the one who should do anything since its a thirdparty who made thisurl rewrite. you should probably take this matter to vbseo themself and ask them to release a product for xenforo
 
I run vB3 with vBSEO so will be interested to see when I install, what I can and cannot save/redirect. I'm mainly just interested in threads (rather than forums, which will be shifted around anyway, or member pages, which don't contain an awful lot). I will of course report back here as I am sure many others will.

Lessons learned (for me) here are - the more plug ins, mods and 3rd party add ons you stuff into the forum, the more pain you experience later on!!

It's also a good lesson for would-be webmasters here, plan your URL and SEO approach very carefully and make sure if you need to change product in the future (or URL etc) you can redirect traffic OK.
 
i dont really think xenforo is the one who should do anything since its a thirdparty who made thisurl rewrite. you should probably take this matter to vbseo themself and ask them to release a product for xenforo
XF is not obligated to do anything for vBSEO users who want to keep their URLs the same, but it would nonetheless be better for their business it they did. vBSEO is a plugin for vB, if the same company would be interested to make a plugin, it would be called XFSEO, but there are no plans that I know of for such a plugin. So we're stuck unless someone can make an unofficial tool/add-on.
 
XF is not obligated to do anything for vBSEO users who want to keep their URLs the same, but it would nonetheless be better for their business it they did. vBSEO is a plugin for vB, if the same company would be interested to make a plugin, it would be called XFSEO, but there are no plans that I know of for such a plugin. So we're stuck unless someone can make an unofficial tool/add-on.
The reason they can't make a tool most likely has to do with how people will have completely varying URL structures.

If there were only 1-2 structures, chances are they would be able to say they would allow conversions of the URL to XenForo's structure, but expecting them to support god knows how many URL structures seems ridiculous. 
 
It doesn't matter how many structures there are, if users themselves could enter their preferred url structure in XF ACP. Just like they did in vbSEO. The problem here is the fact that alpha is almost over so they simply do not have the time to implement more advanced URL rewrite features.
 
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