While I believe that IB should have included a warning about potential effects for changing URLs, it is the responsibility of the site owner to consider the risks and determine the best course of action.
I implemented vbseo on one 3.x site and while it has benefited significantly in exposure and content relevancy, it never really re-gained it's previous rank.
However, a couple years before I implemented an seo solution on another vb 3.x site that resulted in a change on hundreds of thousands of URLs - and traffic increased exponentially.
Although it is possible to maintain your URL structure, I think the drop in traffic on so many vb4 sites represents user's impression. If a forum isn't fun to use, there's always somewhere else to go.
I implemented vbseo on one 3.x site and while it has benefited significantly in exposure and content relevancy, it never really re-gained it's previous rank.
However, a couple years before I implemented an seo solution on another vb 3.x site that resulted in a change on hundreds of thousands of URLs - and traffic increased exponentially.
Although it is possible to maintain your URL structure, I think the drop in traffic on so many vb4 sites represents user's impression. If a forum isn't fun to use, there's always somewhere else to go.
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