SEO when migrating software

vulcano

Hello everyone, hope I'm in the right place.
As i mentioned elsewhere I may be moving from phpbb3.2 to flarum soon, but now I'm wondering: my forum is well indexed in search engines (that's where we get most of the users), do you think we'd get penalized for migrating?

I'm thinking of using a small script to redirect old phpbb pages to new flarum pages, but I'm not sure what's the most efficient and SEO-friendly way of doing that, and how much damage would we take anyway.

Do you have any opinion on the matter?

phenomlab

vulcano 301 redirect is the way forward here. You can do this via htaccess or NGINX.conf

Jason

First of all nice that you making the switch. I believe if you use script to redirect old phpbb pages/url to flarum then it won't be an issue. Damage is minimal if you use the script else it will take time to again index new urls. As long as user are re-directed to your main forum you won't have an issue. Anyway let the experts key in their opinion.

Abhi

Google recommends 301 redirect for such changes. Make sure that your change in URL does not end with too many 404 errors. Google does not like that.

Also, make sure that your forum is crawled again the switch. I think there is something in the Search Console for this.

You can re-submit the Sitemap for better crawl results. Good luck.

vulcano

Abhi thank you, I'll do my best and try to report back in an year 😄

phenomlab

Abhi You can re-submit the Sitemap for better crawl results. Good luck.

Are you changing the domain name or just the URL structure ?

admin

There are scripts which do this for you. Or you can write on yourself if it is easy for you. But there is some link where you can download the script. Be careful what you download 👍

Abhi

phenomlab I was told that when go for such a major change in software, it is always better to submit a latest sitemap and attempt a recrawl by the Google bot.