Need help with SEO set up and redirects

[lappanion]

Hi there,

a year ago we have bought a forum that was running on a free forum software and have since changed over to VB4 and got the VB5 license along with it but have totally neglected the SEO part and just sort of copy pasted posts without 301 redirects as well as articles without redirects.

Would you recommend switching over to VB5 already or should we get VBSEO or just create manual redirects? I am a little lost here not sure what the best way to get started is? We still have a whole bunch of articles to move over to the new forum and would like to do it right this time...

Thanks :)

[Spangle]

Hi there,

a year ago we have bought a forum that was running on a free forum software and have since changed over to VB4 and got the VB5 license along with it but have totally neglected the SEO part and just sort of copy pasted posts without 301 redirects as well as articles without redirects.

Would you recommend switching over to VB5 already or should we get VBSEO or just create manual redirects? I am a little lost here not sure what the best way to get started is? We still have a whole bunch of articles to move over to the new forum and would like to do it right this time...

Thanks :)

Do not use VBSEO, most try it then uninstall it, you can do better than that on your own, personally I wouldn't worry too much about copying and pasting posts, far too labour intensive, what you need to so though is transfer any decent articles to the new forum, and you must delete them from the old forum, or Google will see it as plagiarising, in fact it is better to transfer it, and leave it a couple of weeks before re-posting, that will give Google a chance to de-index it from the old site.

VB5 is not really ready for a live board despite what VB tell you, it is still full of bugs, you are better off putting it all on to a VB4 install, then when VB5 is ready, you can easily upgrade.