I migrated from Vbulletin 5 to IPS. I notice that Search engines see topics with a 301 redirect. I also realize if I remove the converter (uninstall) then those redirects would be lost and it could have an effect if other sites are linking to my site. However, with the 301 redirects, and with so many of them that are not linked to, and as they are showing up with a 301 will this not have an adverse effect in the search engines since some link juice is lost?

Point being if there are limited sites linking to mine would it be better to uninstall the converter and let Google index these with a 200 response rather than a 301?

Edited September 12, 20186 yr by Christforums

Build your site map, submit it to search engines. 

Search engines are smart enough to follow 301’s. Eventually you’ll get fewer and fewer 301s as your site is reindexed and re crawled. 

If you remove the converter you may also lose the ability for users that haven’t logged in under IPS to use their VB password to login. I’ve not looked at the converter in ages, so I don’t know if that’s still the case. 

You WANT the old URLs to 301 redirect to the new location. I would encourage you not to disable the Converter app. Simply disabling the app will instead likely result in 404 errors because the content cannot be found (of course, depending on what old files and such you've left on your server).