Should we upgrade forum version?

[Karen Blundell]

Hey Guys,
My team's having a forum, vbulletin version 3x with 100K posts, traffic over 500 UVs daily, but I have heard about Google will consider as bad SEO factor for non responsive sites and decreasing its rankings on their site, vB3 was not supported fully responsive.
We want to update to vb5 version which supported responsive. But problem is, If update to a higher version, then all forum URLs will be changed and we can lose our pageranks on all our web pages, exclude homepage (root domain)

According to you, we should update to higher version for support responsive but urls will be changed. What is your advice?

Thanks in advanced.

 

[ElixantTechnology]

I would definitely recommend upgrading your forum, however I would also recommend you leave vBulltin in the rear view and start using some new blood software. I am currently eyeing Woltlab's Burning Board for a community I am planning on building. If that one doesn't catch your eye, maybe Xenforo might do the trick for you. vBulletin has been on a downward spiral since they got bought out; the old developers are now working with Xenforo.

 

[SEOPub]

but I have heard about Google will consider as bad SEO factor for non responsive sites and decreasing its rankings on their site

That is only for searches performed on smartphones. If your site does not rely on search traffic from smartphones, you do not really have anything to worry about.

 

[Karen Blundell]

I would definitely recommend upgrading your forum, however I would also recommend you leave vBulltin in the rear view and start using some new blood software. I am currently eyeing Woltlab's Burning Board for a community I am planning on building. If that one doesn't catch your eye, maybe Xenforo might do the trick for you. vBulletin has been on a downward spiral since they got bought out; the old developers are now working with Xenforo.

I have just have a look on this cms, its price is low but more extra fees included
it looks good and the same as xenforo, do you know its advantages over xen and vB? does it have more addons?

That is only for searches performed on smartphones. If your site does not rely on search traffic from smartphones, you do not really have anything to worry about.

I see that.
what about URLs structure? does it affect on search rankings while content still keeps the same but URL changed?

 

[webpundits]

Hi,

Yes I will also recommend you to upgrade the forum to the latest version. Before doing that, you should have tested the upgrade on your localhost to understand the changes done by vbulletin as your live visitors must not have any issues. Plus email all your users regarding your upgrade to keep them in a loop so that you must not loose a visitor. SEO is also most important factor as there are many options like URL structure in vb that makes you confused.

Regards

 

[elcidofaguy]

There is some good advice stated above... But I feel one very important point has been neglected... You should make sure you use the canonicalization tag on all of your pages so that you ensure that one version of your webpage URL is given credit and thus ensuring that link juice is consolidated... e.g. add this to tag within the head section of your HTML:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mywebsite.com/blog/article-on-how-to-do-xyz" />

Then this will ensure variants of that page URL e.g. without www. prefix, post-id and mobile rendered/redirected will point to the version you want with link juice consolidated...

You can read more about this here for starters....

With that said - Indeed I would go for the upgrade!