Changed from /board/index.php3 to /board/index.php have we messed up google archive?

[Make Money?-old]

Due to server tweak / upgrades after some hack & DoS attacks

We changed our forum from having the suffix /board/index.php3

to /board/index.php

Just before the web master did this they asked me if we were using an 'archive' feature....

....I wasn't sure and didnt have a clear head at that moment. Now, having perhaps realised what is going on, I fear that over 3 years of google archive links to our forum will now be pointing people to the dead /board/index.php3 links...leading them nowhere and giving the impression we were an old site - now out of business.

We get / got a lot of referral from our old information up on Google - its the main way people come to learn about our forum.

Is there anything we can do?

As a site that wants a long term record of its forum on line - is this perhaps unwise?

Should we reverse it? And go back to being /board/index.php3 ?

Can we somehow FORWARD these /board/index.php3 Google search people to the /board/index.php forum and even to a new CHANGED thread links?

:confused:

Please advise!

[Zachery]

I'm not exactly sure, but I think it might be easiyish with mod_rewrite to just rewrite all 404 urls with php3 to just php.

You might want to try asking at sitepoint or devshed with users who are much more familiar with mod_rewrite and other programing languages.

[Make Money?-old]

The web tech has figured it out. (I dont know how, probably from the advice above! - we are .php but all our .php3 links on google now work fine - no 404 errors)

Thanks very much..

How DOES, say a URL suffix - /board/archive/index.php3/t-10783.html (thats just one of our threads 'archive URL's') get created?

Is this an option set within the GS admin panel? (if so where is it so I can make sure it is on after our recent upgrade)

Or is it somehow automatic..?

This is great - as it brings us people from Google all the time.. who may find VERY OLD topic links..

How does this work? Can anyone explain the VBulletin / Google 'archive' relationship to me please?

Our power users actually search GOOGLE first sometimes to find threads!

Thanks v much

:)

[landspro]

My forum has just been upgraded from 2.2.6 to 3.7.2, and I am experiencing the same problems with google as well as member bookmarks.

Vbulletin support tells me:

"use a .htaccess file on the server with some rewrite rules to automatically map the old PHP3 links to the new PHP files. I recommend this solution since PHP is really the standard and PHP3 is somewhat deprecated.
The people in the server forum can help with htaccess rewrite rules:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=14 (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=14) "

I have no clue how to even begin to do this.

Can someone help me?

TIA!!!