Dont Buy VBSEO

[imported_silkroad]

First of all, the "three simple rewrite rule examples" in the vBSEO post (discussed earlier) do not rewrite (undo) all the VBSEO URLs in various search engine indexes.

Whoever above said "you only need these simple rules and nothing else" .. that poster is wrong.

For example, if you were using vBSEO to rewrite your forums titles, and your forum was (before vBSEO):

/showforum?f=111

and after vBSEO it was:

/this-is-my-forum-above/

... and you have many forums, there is no way to have a single mod_rewrite rule to for the forums.

Each forum will need a rewrite rule similar to this:

RewriteRule  ^this-is-my-forum-above/$  /showforum?f=111 [R=301,L]

So, if you had 100 forums using this scheme, you will need 100 rewrite rules under this same scheme.

Please, do not be "fooled" by those who think a few simple mod_rewrite rules will work for all vBSEO configurations in all forums!

.. if you were running vBSEO and just used a few simple rules, simply go look at your access log file for all the 404 errors (simple example below), and you will quickly understand what I am talking about.

tail -f access.log | grep " 404 "

If you were using a vBSEO schema with the forum number in the URL, then you can do it with one rule, for example:

/this-is-my-forum-above-f111/

You can get by with a rule such as:

RewriteRule  ^this-is-my-forum-above-f([0-9]+)/$  /showforum?f=$1 [R=301,L]

vBSEO had many different configurations, and many people did not use the forum id in the vBSEO URL.

If there is a lesson to be learned here (and there are many), is to make sure you use the forum ID (or thread ID, etc) in our "friendly URLs" because if you don't have unique ids in your "friendly URLs' then you will have trouble to undo them if something like this happens again (you need to revert back).

Cheers.