I currently have a phpbb2 forum setup on my site and will be switching over to vBulletin soon. What I am wondering is that, if I setup VBulletin where the current forums exist, won't the co-op fail validation because those pages won't be there anymore (but will still exist in Google's index)? Is my only option to setup my forums in a different directory and leave the old forums up?
Your other option is to request index exclusion from Google from those pages that don't exist anymore. Adding the phpbb folder to the robots exlusion in the robots.txt file can also speed it up. But your suggestion is the easiest. Perhaps if the forums are now in yourdomain.com/forum/ you could make ir yourdomain.com/forums.
Here is an easy answer Make a Custom 404 Page Just put the adsense code on the custom 404 page. You dont need to worry about all the rest. Also - the PHPbb to vBulletin concersion is real easy... -
I switched from IPB to vB and kept the old forums in a forum subfolder with lots of nice anchor text links to the new forum which I created as a forums sub-domain. Worked well for me as I now have 1,000 pages in the old unused forums with ads on and about 20K indexed pages in the new forums. Took about 2 months to get the new forums fully indexed.
Yeah, I thought about your later suggestion (with the exception that it would become mysite.com/forum since phpbb2 is already in the mysite.com/forums folder). How fast does the robot exclusion work? And once I take out the robots file (like when I get my new forums up) I take it google will start to crawl and index those pages again, right?
That's a good idea. Though I am assuming you mean co-op code and not adsense code? I take it that the co-op will still validate even if the indexed url is being redirected to a page with the co-op ads running on it, correct? I've heard otherwise, that co-op ads won't validate even if the page in question is redirected to a page running the co-op ads.