So my sites PR is 1/10... bottom of the barrel and I'm doing some things to not only improve that, but to improve activity and expand the userbase and activity on the site as well. One of those things is installing a new version of my forum that has SEO friendly URL's. So isntead of /forum/index.php?action=viewtopic&tid=4&page=1 The link is /forum/the-topic-of-this-post.html Problem is, google has 86 pages of my forum in their database store by the first method. To top it off, when the site was indexed the forum was throwing an error, so almost every result the description was a PHP error. I plan on adding a disallow tag to forum/index.php on my robots.txt file just incase the googlebot does find a bad link, as well as submitting a sitemap of my forum with the friendly URL's. When my site is re-indexed by Gbot, will all those old links be gone and replaced with the new ones ?
You just ignore those pages google has already indexed. Next time GoogleBot visits and indexes your site, it will index new URLs of your pages. If you're worry about "page unreachable" that come from old URLs, you can use "mod_rewrite" to redirect old unreachable URLs to your new clean and friendly URLs. If you don't know about using "mod_rewrite" or redirecting using mod_rewrite, you should find some tutorials explaning about it. it's very useful
I am using mod_rewrite to transform the old URL's into the new friendly URL's. I don't want google to have both the new and old URL's listed though, I've read thats frowned upon to have multiple pages with identical content. So your saying when it indexes the site, it will delete everything it has now, and replace that with the new data ? I can live with that.
yes, it delete old URL when you redirect it into new one. that work with my site after i used friendly URLs instead of old ugly URLs. Or, go to Google Webmasters Tools > URL Removals. you can tell google to remove any pages you don't need. but i'm not sure how long google take to remove your page. hope it's helpful.