Are SEF Urls required? Does it actually help your site getting indexed? For example, my forum: http://www.adminfuel.com now has SEF URLs, so all the .php URLs are removed and replaced with nicer ones. But before I changed, I had around 4000 results in Google. Since the change, I only have around 300. Have the SEF URLs had a bad effect? I have been using them for around 5 months and the results in Google haven't picked up.
I certainly hope you 301 redirected EVERY old URL to the new so called SEF URL... If not your rankings (if you had any) are going to go into the sh*tter! You'll essentially be starting all over trying to get your pages to rank. You need to 301 redirect old URLs to new URLs so that when the search engines try to recrawl the old pages, they'll know that they have moved. They will transfer credit for the inbound links to the old URLs (and the associated link text) to the new URL. Google will even replace the old URLs in their index with the new URLs (the morons at Yahoo! don't seem to do so). BTW... I'm still seeing URLs like http://www.adminfuel.com/f23/?ltr=P&sort=&order= which are not at all SEF.
I think they have been 301 redirected. Any way to check - is there any point now? I am using vbSEO so I thought that would handle the redirections.
If you have Firebug for Firefox you can tell.. Or simply go to http://urivalet.com/ and enter one of your old URLs (non-SEO friendly). The tool will show you all interactions between the browser and web server so you'll see the browser request the old URL, the server return a 301, the browser request the new SEF URL, and the server return a 200 if you have 301s in place.