Moving forum to subfolder
-
Hi,
we're thinking of moving our very well established forum to a subfolder on our main domain. I have read that this would be much better for seo reasons/domain authority rather than using a sub domain. Is this correct?
Our forum has 15,000 users and gets roughly over 502,087 impressions from 101,147 visits a month.
Thanks,
James
-
Forums are open ended so you can easily end up with pages that are low in quality content and with post-panda google this could have a negative effect on the whole domain. Forums are also targeted for link building schemes which, unless actively moderated, could end up with you linking to lots of illegal sites that could end up penalising you.
-
Hi Daylan,
Thanks for the link, it was interesting reading.
"Perhaps check your numbers for your current forum first. See if you can notice anything that may be harming or improved with the current forum site and fix those before you migrate in."
How would I go about this?
Thanks,
James
-
Thanks Steven,
Why would our forum get penalised for spam? I've never heard of this happening to us. What would be the cause?
Our forum is on a full domain www.weddingideaschat.com. I am thinking of putting it on our website www.weddingideasmag.com so it looks like www.weddingideasmag.com/forum
James
-
As Steven mentioned, you gotta be careful when doing this. As there is often a very long 'leash' as far as content on forums, i've heard of instances where adding a forum to the main domain has harmed popular SERPs for keywords and domain authority. Especially since Panda.
Perhaps check your numbers for your current forum first. See if you can notice anything that may be harming or improved with the current forum site and fix those before you migrate in.
There was a conversation about this earlier in the week that might help you out a little more:
Good luck
-
Yes it will be better as a sub-domain will be treated separately. Where is the forum currently located though, on a sub domain? If so make sure you keep the old URLs active with canonical tags or redirects to the new locations so that users and bots get pushed over.
The downside is that if your forum is likely to be penalised for spam, then it will start to effect the ranking of your whole site rather than just the subdomain.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is 301 redirects a deal breaker for Migrating content or moving to new software?
I have this forum with about 2 million posts for 16 years on root of the domain. I am looking to switch softwares but the top ones won’t help setup 301 redirects. But I can still migrate all my members and all my content (threads/posts), would Google still reindex all our content or if we don’t setup redirects would it really kill our entire traffic for a long time or maybe just a month or so? I really want to migrate to software that isn’t forum based but rather something that offers courses, chat, live video streaming, subscription based etc. and this is the only way to do so OR to set it up on an entirely new domain OR subdomain but to me that is like starting all over from scratch? I could archive the forum to read only and set it up on subdomain or another root domain - then on the archived forum setup banners and a pop up linking to the new site or new subdomain? . This is such a hard decision for us as the current forum we have had for so many years has lost members posting from 1k a day to just a handful a day, our fb group though gets 1k a day so I’m trying to revive a site into something more modern and has all the training features we can offer as well.
Technical SEO | | vbsk0 -
Subdomain or subfolder?
Hello, We are working on a new site. The idea of the site is to have an ecommerce shop, but the homepage will be a content page, basically a blog page.
Technical SEO | | pinder325
My developer wants to have the blog (home) page on a subdomain, so blog.example.com, because it will be easier to make a nice content page this way, and the the rest of the site will just be on the root domain (example.com). I'm just worried that this will be bad for our SEO efforts. I've always thought it was better to use a sub folder rather than a subdomain. If we get links to the content on the subdomain, will the link juice flow to the shop, on the root domain? What are your thoughts?0 -
Reverse proxy a successful blog from subdomain to subfolder?
I have an ecommerce site that we'll call confusedseo.com. I created a WordPress blog and CNAME'd it to blog.confusedseo.com. Since then, the blog has earned a PageRank of 3 and a decent amount of organic traffic. I am considering a reverse proxy to forward blog.confusedseo.com to confusedseo.com/blog/. As I understand it, this will greatly help the "link juice" of the root domain. However, I'm concerned about any potential harm done to the existing SEO value of the blog. What, if anything, should I be doing to ensure that the reverse proxy doesn't hurt my "juice" rather than help it?
Technical SEO | | bedbugsupply0 -
Moving Blog Question
Site A is my primary site. I created a blog on site B and wrote good content and gave links back to site A. I think this is causing a penalty to occur. I no longer want to update site B and want to move the entire blog and it's content to sitea.com/blog. Is this a good idea or should I just start a fresh/new sitea/blog and just remove the links from site B to site A?
Technical SEO | | CLTMichael0 -
Moving to Dynamic IP
Hi all, We are going to use CDN with geographically distributed IPs. However the website has strong positions in local search in UK and in regular search for geo kwds. Is it possible that with moving to from UK static IP to dynamic IPs can affect positions in Google? Thanks, Jane
Technical SEO | | Jane_Barry0 -
Set base-href to subfolders - problems?
A customer is using the <base>-tag in an odd way: <base href="http://domain.com/1.0.0/1/1/"> My own theory is that the subfolders are added as the root because of revision control. CSS, images and internal links are used like this:
Technical SEO | | Vivamedia
internal link I ran a test with Xenu Link Sleuth and found many broken links on the site, but I can't say if it is due to the base-tag. I have read that the base-tag may cause problems in some browsers, but is this usage of base-tag bad in some SEO-perspective? I have a lot of problems with this customer and I want to know if the base-tag is a part of it.0 -
Forum Profile Links
Are they really important? Many preach they are, and there are tonnes of services out there who give you thousands of forum profile links in no time. I strictly believe in genuine links built the hard way, and definitely don't want to get into anything which is black hat. Please suggest if building several Forum Profile Links is an appropriate way of building links?
Technical SEO | | KS__2 -
Moving domain.com to subdomain.domain.com
Hi, I like to do something, but first like to take some opinions from seomoz. My question is: 1. I have a domain: brandtrends.com and i like to move this from brandtrends.com to trends.brand.com because: brandtrends.com is on the position #15 on the second page of SERP for my "brand" keyword. I like to move it under trends.brand.com but all inbound-links are @brandtrends.com What do you thing, if i move permanently 301 from brandtrends.com to trends.brand.com does it rank under brand.com on the 1st page of SERP..? like to rank trends.brand.com under brand.com on results page...!!! I have the backlinks of brandtrends.com on my hands too, should i leave the inbound links @brandtrends.com and the new ones i build with trends.brand.com or should i change the inbound links from brandtrends.com to trends.brand.com Hope you got it! THanks
Technical SEO | | leadsprofi0