I changed from phpBB2 to vbulletin, should I do something for the crawlers?

As the title says, last wednesday I decided to that a forum had gotten large enough that the benefits of changing would upweight the price of vbulletin, so I went ahead and imported everything from phpBB2 to vbulletin and so far it's been a very positive experience - the users even like it

However I now have 24.000 dead links in google pointing to the phpBB2 viewthread pages, and none of the vbulletin ones, this is ofcouse rather inconvenient.

Shortly after making the change I installed the vbseo sitemap plugin and submittet that to google (never been using sitemaps for the forum before). But it hasn't helped yet, googlebot has touched the index page and 4-5 threads but no more and only the index one is shown in a search.

Today googlebot has been attempting to crawl the phpBB2 urls like crazy, so I'm guessing it has noticed something is up, but is there anything else I should do to ensure that the new vbulletin urls gets crawled? Should I do some redirects for the dead urls or just leave google to sort it out eventually?

 

And how many people, forums, visits can not phpbb handel?

 

No idea, I'm sorry if I gave that impression, but that wasn't the reason for changing. It was primarily better administration, extra features and security.

I have Threads: 3,652, Posts: 83,476 and phpBB2 ran that fine.

 

jag trodde du hade druckig för många öl!
Ahh ok i was asking beucase i am starting a forum in phpbb soon and i know its going to get loads of traffic. What program did you use to transfer the stuff?

 

you can do a 301 redirect or a custom 404 error page. Wither way, google will find everything in a few weeks or so.

 

Vbulletin has an "impex" program that made the transfer quite easy, just a few clicks and a bit of waiting and everything was imported into the new forum.

 

I've though about a custom 404 page that just tells that we have changed software and points a link to the forum index, I think I'll go with that and just try to be patient.

Thanks

 

Nice to know when i am done playing around with phpbb i can switch to a pro program without any problems thanks