Question Best Way to Rename Forum

[neounix]

Hello,

How do we rename forums without losing the old backlinks and SEO values?

Thanks.

 

[Fillip H.]

Hi there,

When you say rename forums, do you mean:

1. Change the actual name of the forum (e.g. "DragonByte Tech" to "NewCompany")
2. Move the forum to another folder / a subfolder
3. Change the domain of the forum (e.g. dragonbyte-tech.com to dragonbyte.com)

1. This shouldn't require any changes
2. You would need to add a .htaccess (or nginx.conf) rule that redirected the old URLs to the new folder. How complex these rules need to be depend on how your URLs are set up.
3. You'd need something like

   	RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.dragonbyte-tech\.com
   RewriteRule (.*) http://www.dragonbyte-tech.com/$1 [R=301,L,QSA]

Hope that helps

 

[neounix]

No... I mean the name of a forum inside the forum, not the site name......

In vBulletin, a "forum" is one of the forums set up in the forum, not the site name.

For example:

http://www.unix.com/linux-open-source/

is a forum .... "Open Source"

I want to change the name, for example to:

"Linux Open Source"

so the new URL will end up

http://www.unix.com/linux-open-source/

When I did the before (DBSEO running today), it seemed to cause a lot of problems.

I thought DBSEO automatically took care of this; but I was wrong; so I guess I did it wrong.

 

[Fillip H.]

No... I mean the name of a forum inside the forum, not the site name......

Oh, I see, sorry

In vBulletin, a "forum" is one of the forums set up in the forum, not the site name.

Thank you for the explanation With no further detail in your first post, and plenty of people referring to "a forum" as the site as a whole, I made an assumption.

Hopefully you can forgive my mistake

[..]

I thought DBSEO automatically took care of this; but I was wrong; so I guess I did it wrong.

DBSEO can only do this automatically if you include the forum IDs in your URLs.

You should be able to redirect it to the new SEO'd URL by using the "Custom Redirects" feature:

'^open-source/' => 'linux-open-source/'

Some refinement might be needed if you need to include URL query parameters, but it uses normal regexp syntax

 

[DragonByte Technologies]

Hello neounix,

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