Hi: I noticed that the URLs for previously posted topcs have changed. Anyway someone can post how old posting IDs can be used with the new URL formats. eg. http://www.sql-server-performance.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=15002 doesn't work any more
I believe webmaster is looking at this issue to get previous threads for reference, you might hear from him soon.
I'm not sure there is a way to map the threads on the old site with the new threads. By any chance is http://sql-server-performance.com/Community/forums/t/15002.aspx the thread you were looking for?
Good, that explains the difference between previous one and current handling of links, hope they are cached on Google soon for further reference.
Please let me know of any popular posts with broken links and I will manually fix them. There could well be a problem with google indexing old forum threads, unfortunately ASP.NET 2.0 doesn't support regex in url redirects so a new 301 redirect would have had to be manually created for all threads (we did this for all the article/faq/tip pages but it was just too big a job for the forum pages). I have set the 404 error page to redirect to the forum.
Just to clear up where we are on this issue: Old links to previous forum threads will not work on the new forum (by default they will redirect back to the forum homepage). Google still has the old threads in its index but hopefully they will be replaced with the new threads. To find the location of new threads please use the 'Search Forums' box at the top of each forum page to search for the text/title of the thread.
Thats better now, rather than trying the mocking up of link from old to new. To addup search functionality has been improved to its level as you will get the speeds with Google or any other search engine!
Google will need some time to remove the old links. I would check their faq site. I think there is an option to speed up this process.
I'm sure there is a snippet (open source) to update them... but again I would say having the previous forums as READONLY would help for time being....[:'(]
The problem with putting the old forum up and readonly is that Google will then continue to index the old forum and will probably prefer to keep the old pages in its index rather than the new forum pages. Also, the new pages could fall foul of Google's duplicate content filter and get banned. Hopefully it won't take too long to index (I don't think there is a way to speed this up) - the new article pages are already in the index.
True, tips & articles are optimized with search engines now except the forums.... As you said its another overhead to welcome ... not sure whether you can restrict such search engine optimization....
