Question vBSEO compatibility for non-English characters in DBSEO?

[joelhinz]

Hi,

I was recently handed an old vB installation which I've upgraded to 3.8.9. I've thrown out vBSEO on a dev copy and am looking for replacements, so I've tried DBSEO lite and I'm thoroughly pleased. I do however have a presales question about the one problem I have which may be kind of a possible dealbreaker.

Whenever a thread topic or forum title has a Swedish letter that doesn't exist in English ([åäöÅÄÖ]) as the first or second character, that letter and any letter preceding it is removed from the url entirely. I need it simply removed if it's the first character, or replaced by a - if it's the second. For instance:

Topic: Månadens trådstart
DBSEO: 69903-nadens-tr-dstart
vBSEO: 69903-m-nadens-tr-dstart

Title: Övrigt
DBSEO: -vrigt
vBSEO: vrigt

I managed to solve the second problem by enabling legacy mode, but I mention it anyway in case the two are related.

Is this something that can be fixed in the paid version of DBSEO somehow? It affects about 8.5 % of the forum's threads, so we'd lose massive link value if we changed from vBSEO and it caused urls to differ from how they used to look.

Thank you.

 

[Fillip H.]

You will not lose any link value, as the thread ID is contained in the URL, meaning that the URLs will always be resolveable by DBSEO.

What's the value of the "Non-Latin Characters" setting?

 

[joelhinz]

Thanks for the very prompt reply. I am not concerned about users reaching the desired page - that part works fine. Thousands of threads suddenly changing links in the forums is a problem, though, since search engines have the threads indexed by their former urls.

I have tried all three values of the Non-Latin Characters setting, with the following results:

Topic example: Månadens trådstart (...)
Keep: 69903-ånadens-trådstart (...)
Remove: 69903-nadens-tr-dstart (...)
Replace: 69903-manadens-tradstart (...)
Desired: 69903-m-nadens-tr-dstart (...)

I also checked some other patterns and found it's not the only anomaly type, e.g.:

Topic example: Data köp!
Keep: 71023-data-ö.html
Remove: 71023-data.html
Replace: 71023-data-koep.html
Desired: 71023-data-k-p.html

 

[Fillip H.]

Thanks for the very prompt reply. I am not concerned about users reaching the desired page - that part works fine. Thousands of threads suddenly changing links in the forums is a problem, though, since search engines have the threads indexed by their former urls.

Why is it?

If users search for keywords matching your content, they then click an old indexed URL and get 301 redirected to the new URL, which will (over time) get indexed as the new URL, how is this a problem?

I don't mean this in a sarcastic way, I'm genuinely curious as to why you say this is a problem as to me, it doesn't seem like a problem at all.

 

[Fillip H.]

Hello joelhinz,

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