SEO when moving forum platform

[woopwoop]

I know the theory but not the practice.

I guess the theory is to find all links which are in google and after the transfer, either have the same url names, page titles etc., or if not then have 301 redirects from the old to the new (in the .htaccess) - let me know if I have the theory wrong

Here's my problem with the practice. The site I want to move is a PR5 phpnuke forum which site which seems broken all over. Clicking 'new posts' gets me an error page. I want to move it to an IPB platform, and try and so all the seo stuff I can. Google shows that there are over 3000 pages indexed - many dynamic looking.

Does anyone have any tips on how to do this?
Especially the PHPNUKE - IPB change over?
Will I need to try and put 3000+ 301 redirects in the .htaccess ? (because I doubt I can keep the same file names)
How would I even get the whole list of urls, and then get the list of new urls and mathch them up perfectly to add to the htaccess?


This does sound like mission impossible.
But if i just forget about seo, pagerank, redirects etc. then that's pretty bad also isn't it? Or should I just create a useful 404 not found page with a bunch of links out, submit a new site map and hope the serach engines figure it out without hurting the rankings?


Many thanks for any help.

 

[woopwoop]

just thought that I'm also needing to keep track of the links to my pages from other websites too (and not just the indexed pages). This seems like a big job!

 

[woopwoop]

anyone ?

Would be a shame to mess this up - but the site really needs changing up

 

[retired_member21]

Xenu (export as list and also map)

Excel (import above export(s) & generate rewrites using concat etc)

.htaccess / rewritemap

 

[jimm]

I haven't tested it but I would expect 3k+ rewrite rules would put some serious load on the server. Is there not some regex you can use to cut that down a lot.
What is the start and finish URL structure?

 

[woopwoop]

Thanks Nick and Jimm for your comments.

The URL structure isn't completely constant.
Most of the pages will be a originating from a phpBB forum structure ending up as a 'seo friendly url' invision board forum.

Will try and find examples but this project has been put on hold for a few weeks.

Thanks again