Convert vBulletin to Drupal but maintain friendly urls for SEO?

I'm fed up with VB and looking to convert a big vBulletin board to Drupal. But I don't want to lose the links of the开发者_高级运维 friendly urls and risk having everything re-indexed by Google. How can I maintain those urls? The site and huge has been around since 2002. I don't want to be penalised by Google.

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With path (part of Drupal core) and pathauto you can create user friendly urls.

Path allows you to change how your urls look at a per url basis, where path_auto helps you with automatically creating those urls based on some simplerules when content is created etc.

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I am now dealing with a site that was migrated from vBulletin to Drupal 7 using native Forum (+Advanced Forum).

In the migration I inherited, they built new SEO-friendly URLs using PathAuto but did not make URL aliases [ !? ]. You at least will be using the same URLS.

But either way you will need do something for the replies/comments.

In vBulletin replies to threads are the same content type as the first post in a thread - all 'posts'. But in D7 the first post in a thread is a 'node' and all the replies are just 'comments' on that node.

The standard Drupal Migrate tool will make a table in your database mapping the vBulletin post to the D7 comment, but it will not make a URL alias, so any requests that come in for a specific post will get a 404 unless you handle them.

You can get the threadid for the post in the vBulletin db, and then look up the D7 node that the post will now belong to [as a comment] in the migrate_map_forum_threads or similar table in your D7 db.

I wrote a script to join the data from both DBs to create a map, you can have it if you like.

I am still figuring out the best way to actually use the map since on my virtual server I do not have permission to use mod_rewrite's RewriteMap directive. If you can use that it is the way to go; have Apache handle all the mapping before Drupal even gets involved.