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
-
Moving Shopify from a Sub Domain to the Full Domain
Apologies if this has been asked before. Currently we have a Shopify shop on a subdomain shop.lucybee.com a blog on subdomain blog.lucybee.com and the full domain of course. We'd now like to move everything onto Shopify on the full domain. Therefore the blog rolls into Shopify. We'll manually move pages into Shopify. Any advice or links to resources on how to manage would be gratefully received. Thank you , Jim
Technical SEO | | LucyBee0 -
Forum profile section or signature line as backlink
Hi, Forum profile section or signature line as backlink VS Answering a question and giving a related post URl as the answer is better? I have the above question on which would be better Would a signature or website name in the profile is valuable then a link to your site where information is available? Does Google consider both as spam/blackhat? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Correct linking to the /index of a site and subfolders: what's the best practice? link to: domain.com/ or domain.com/index.html ?
Dear all, starting with my .htaccess file: RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | inlinear
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.inlinear.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://inlinear.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://inlinear.com/ [R=301,L] 1. I redirect all URL-requests with www. to the non www-version...
2. all requests with "index.html" will be redirected to "domain.com/" My questions are: A) When linking from a page to my frontpage (home) the best practice is?: "http://domain.com/" the best and NOT: "http://domain.com/index.php" B) When linking to the index of a subfolder "http://domain.com/products/index.php" I should link also to: "http://domain.com/products/" and not put also the index.php..., right? C) When I define the canonical ULR, should I also define it just: "http://domain.com/products/" or in this case I should link to the definite file: "http://domain.com/products**/index.php**" Is A) B) the best practice? and C) ? Thanks for all replies! 🙂
Holger0 -
Moving content
I have www.SiteA.com which contains a number of sections of content, a section of which (i.e. www.SiteA.com/sectionA), we would like to move to a new domain www.SiteB.com Definitely we will ensure that a redirect strategy is in place and that we submit a sitemap for SiteB Three Questions 1. Anything else I am missing from the migration plan? 2. Since we are only moving part of SiteA to SiteB, is there another way of telling Google that we changed address for that section or are the 301s enough? 3. Currently, Section A (under SiteA) contains a subsection where we were posting an article a day. In the new site (SiteB), we decided to drop this subsection and write content (but not "exactly" the same content) under a new section. During migration, how should we handle the subsection that we have decided to stop writing? Should we: A. Import the content into SiteB and call it archives and then redirect all the urls from subsection under SiteA to the archives under SiteB? OR B. Do not move the content but redirect all the pages (365 in total) to where we think the user would be more interested in going to on SiteB? Note: A colleague of mine is worried that since the subsection has good content he thinks its necessary to actually move the content to SiteB. But again, looking at the views for the archives it caters for 1% of the the total views of this section. In other words, people only view the article on the day it is written. I hope I was clear 🙂 Your help is appreciated Thank you
Technical SEO | | seo12120 -
What can i do to move my site up the search engines
Hi. my site www.in2town.co.uk is currently number five in google for the search word lifestyle magazine, sometimes it moves to four but for over a year it has not got past four. before we had to do the site from scratch due to a major problem upgrading, we were number one in the search engines and our traffic was around 30% higher than it is now. For the keyword lifestyle news, we are on the fifth page of google and would really like to improve this. I would like to know what i need to do on our home page to try and improve our rankings for these two words. the most important word for us is lifestyle news. any help in my goal to improve our rankings would be great. We have improved our design which we are still working on, and we have upgraded to a bigger dedicated server to improve the speed.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How to move a site slowly
I've got a site that I started back in 2001 (www.jaaroncaststone.com) to sell what I was making, concrete countertops and sinks. Well we're going to be discontinuing the concrete products in a month or so and want to start pointing all the links from the old site to a new one dedicated to a single product (www.jaaron-wood-countertops.com). I don't want to do a full 301 on the old site just yet but can I put a canonical tag on the index and about us pages pointing to the new site now so the search engines start looking that way or should I wait and do a full 301 when the day comes to pull the old site?
Technical SEO | | JAARON0 -
Moving a site from one server to another
Does moving a site's files from one server to another, with all URL's remaining the same, affect page rank? I am moving a site from one server to another. Everything will stay exactly the same, including URL's, file structure, etc. Will this affect page rank, domain importance, etc?
Technical SEO | | Bandicoot0