Keep old vanilla URL for SEO reasons?

robi-bobi

After importing my vanilla v1 discussions into vanilla 2 installation, discussion URLs have changed. This is not good for so many reasons, like links which already point to some discussions, user bookmarked links, google serp rankings etc.

Would it be possible to somehow remain the same URL as before?
Together with popular request for old pages navigation for comments (anti-"more" thread), this could make URLs same.

Linc

Honestly, I would never migrate my own site without a way of maintaining or forwarding discussion URLs. It's suicidal to break every content link. This is critical for imports.

The import shouldn't delete the ImportID of discussions after it's done, and there should be a Dispatch rule that 301 redirects /comments.php?DiscussionID=1 to the new URL.

FoxyFred

Yep, I second what @Lincoln said. Never break a site's link structure, it's bad practice.

We want to migrate our board over to Vanilla 2, and it's critical for us to maintain old links, as we have wiki articles, search engine results, old emails, hand-scrawled Post-its, and more that would self-destruct if the links went away. Well, maybe not quite, but you get the picture. :-)

I may try a hand at writing this myself; first I'm going to check if the Vanilla 1 import maintains conversation IDs — if so, this will be a snap to implement.

Linc

@FoxyFred, it brings them along but then deletes them. I've just pushed an update that removes the deletion of the ImportID from discussions, categories, and users so that forwarding can be done:

http://github.com/lincolnwebs/Garden/commit/95292cc05c8e72843d3b4ac8589f043e73345a3f

FoxyFred

Good stuff, glad to find this in my inbox this morning. This makes writing my plugin trivial. :-)

Mark

I just pushed a new version of the import controller that doesn't alter user, discussion, or comment ids. It may need some tweaking (I haven't tested thoroughly yet), but it will solve the problem without the need for import ids at all.

FoxyFred

Now that is even more awesome. Almost done here.

Linc

@Mark Nice! I'm back on the vBulletin import so this is very relevant to my interests at the moment.

FoxyFred

@Mark I pulled the latest from the Dev branch in github, but I couldn't get the import script to go past step 4.

Anyway, here's my whack at a "Maintain Vanilla 1 links" plugin:
http://gist.github.com/247626

Add a route to your config.php (example is in the file), enable the plugin, and all should work. I think there's a way to add configuration and/or routes automatically, but I haven't yet figured it out. :-)

Mark

@FoxyFred - that is awesome! We should probably package that plugin with Vanilla 2. If you sign the contributor's agreement, we can get it in there.

As for your problems at step 4 - do you have firebug enabled? See if you can watch the xmlhttprequests and see what error comes up.

Linc

@FoxyFred @Mark Found the bug in step 4 - fixt and sent pull request. It was also the core of what was driving me nuts today.