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I am going through the process of porting all forum data from PHP to ASP.net, it's quite a long and difficult process. There are around 30,000 threads, it's been online for quite a few years.

How important is it for me to do 301 redirects from those forum posts to the new forum posts address? It would be quite a painstaking, difficult and slow process matching them up.

Does it matter that much? Should I just take the SEO hit and start fresh with the new one and just wait for Google to reindex it all? Or should I be spending time on this.

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3 Answers

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30,000 threads is a lot of content to lose. I know I'd explore every option available to me to get those redirects done.

I would think that if your old forum and new forums both have a consistent structured URL for threads that you could either write one rewrite rule to redirect them all or write a script to write individual rules for you.

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Yeah thats a good idea, make a general rule for forum/viewtopic.php?ID=[number] that redirect to 301redirect.ashx?url=newforum/topic.aspx?ID=legacyID, and the handler can lookup the correct thread ID if the legacy ID is stored alongside the new ID when I run the import, should be quite easy to implement. – Tom Gullen Mar 30 '11 at 15:14
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It probably depends on how much revenue and traffic you stand to lose from having all those pages drop out of the index as to how important it is to you. If you don't redirect them then any links you have pointing at deep pages (and helping them get or stay indexed) will be useless to the new URLs, so you'll have to do quite a bit of work to get all those new URLs indexed again.

imho it will be less work to redirect then it will be to essentially start from scratch.

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I suppose I could add a new column in the threads table called "LegacyIndex" and the redirector can use that to redirect to the records actual ID which wouldn't be too difficult. – Tom Gullen Mar 30 '11 at 15:01
assuming the content is not changing at all the page titles usually make a good reference point, particularly in forums the page titles are auto generated it's then easy enough to run Xenu or similar to get URL/Title list 1 and URL/Title list 2 to compare then write a redirect or rewrite rule that will get the majority of them. Good luck. – Joshak Mar 31 '11 at 16:38
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This blog was very helpful to understand 301 redirect. As our website was done under CMS, I didn't wanted to change any programming.

Hence, I found the way to redirect 'www. and .co.uk domain to one .com domain in our domain control panel.

I suggest any one who wants to do the same, try to use your Domain management system as this will redirect all request at the root level and also increase page ranking.

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