SEO / Url rewrites?

[MikeM79]

I have been working hard moving lots of legacy content into a vBa home page for my automotive community. It gets almost a million page views a month, fwiw.

Currently, my legacy site does very well in the search engines and I really don't want the place to go "invisible" after switching to vBa. In fact, until I can figure out the url rewrite / SEO issues I will leave vBa under wraps and soldier on with my ancient home page / content.

I gather that url rewrite is not part of vBa, nor is it planned for the future.

I tried searching the forum and came up almost empty.

So.....any words of advice? Has anyone solved this problem? Given the importance of search engines and the potential to monetize page views I would be surprised if somone has not already figured it out. Unfortunately, I am not quite bright enough or well versed enough in computer science to do a credible job myself.

I am willing to pay someone who can solve it, fwiw.

I also use Photopost and Photopost classifieds which both have the same "?" in url issue. I think I can solve it for the message board with vbSEO or use one of the daniweb or vbulletin.org hacks, but that is only a partial solution.

Thanks for whatever insight or advice you can provide.

Oh yeah, one last thing...... I am really enjoying working with vBa....it has everything else that I need to really make my place shine. Many thanks for that.

[ConqSoft]

Search engines can index URLs with ? with no problem.

[MikeM79]

Conq,

Thanks for responding. I love your site, btw. I know nothing about motorcycles but I know a good site when I see one.

I was going to contact you then I read your sig....and since I can't pretend be to illiterate I refrained (despite the fact that I am willing to pay for real expertise).

I have been trying to immerse myself in this SEO stuff, but (as in many things) conflicting info is plentiful. The google site itself cautions against the use of "?" urls, then I read this got really worried: http://www.e-consultancy.com/forum/100843-cms-seo-and-accessibility.html. Maybe I just don't know enough to be discerning in my reading. I am not trying to be argumentative, just trying to provide a peek in the tangled mess between my ears. Long way of saying that I know more about the topic of my forum (muscle car stuff) than I do about the computer technology that runs it.

It seems that there would be a fact based way of determining whether or not google et al has ever "seen" any of my vBa pages. I don't expect them to rank anywhere as only me and about 5 other guys even know they exist....but since google's computers are tireless, maybe they have stumbled upon it but I don't know about it.

Is there a simple way to tell whether or not any of the spiders have come calling?

Thanks again.

I am going to spend some time at vbSEO... my issues are probably considered to be elementary over there.

[ConqSoft]

I should have expanded on that. Google's bots will follow and index URLs with ? in them with no problems. SEO involves MANY things. Having URLs that have keywords in them instead of an id number or single word is one part. It can help get your page up a little higher for certain keywords, since those keywords will also be included in the URL.

I haven't played around with it, but you may be able to use -'s in the CMPS page identifiers to give your pages longer, more descriptive names.

Something like: example.com/index.php?page=this-that-other-thing

Here are some good SEO tips for vBulletin: http://forum.time2dine.co.nz/seo-vbulletin/search-engine-optimize-vbulletin-3-5-a-2460.html

I don't have that many CMPS pages, so I haven't bothered working on their indexing that much. I just use it for some basic pages that are linked from the footer of my site (Like the "About", etc.)

[MikeM79]

Conq,

Thanks for the valuable tips and link. The -'s identifiers is easy enough to do....so why not?

[Brian]

So your main concern here is just making sure that you can keep your current page rank and such with those pages after you move them into the CMPS, right? If so, look into doing some 303 redirects on your old pages.