Old URL's Keep redirecting the to home page (need assistance!)
 

I have asked just about everyone with help about my issue. It's been a week and still I have nothing..

Last week I converted my smf forum over to vb. Everything's fine except I can't redirect my old smf url's to the new vb url's. I looked at this mod but don't know how to use it/can't get it working.

So FINALLY I said forget it. I'll just have to deal with losing my search engine rankings and all those backlinks. I have no other choice. But my old SMF url's are formed like this:

example.com/index.php?topic=555

Which go to my forums homepage even if I have a 404 page set up. I guess it's the /index.php that is causing it to go to my homepage. Now all my old listings in google are being indexed as duplicate content of my homepage.

How Can I STOP vbulletin from directing /index.php? links from going to my homepage!?

You could rename the index.php file. I cant remember where the exact setting is in vb but I know you can change it.

In the root? I think I tried it, and set the setting in vb options but it caused an error. I'll look over it again and make sure


Edit: Yes it works, but my homepage gets a 403 error when i do this. if I go to mysite.com/forum.php, then it works. But I can't have that. I need my forum home at it's root url

You can configure your Apache/web server configuration to take forum.php as the index file.

How do I do that on a shared server?

You would need to contact your host as using a redirect would probably catch everything.