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 -
Moving content to a new domain
I need to move a lot of content with podcasts and show notes to a new domain. Instead of doing redirects, we want to keep some content on the current domain to retain the link value. There are business reason to keep content on both websites but the new website will primarily be used for SEO moving forward.If we keep the audio portion of the podcast on the old website and move the show notes and the audio portion of the podcast to the new website, is there any issues with duplicate content?Long-term, I presume Google will re-index the old and the new pages, thus no duplicate content, but I want to make sure I'm not missing anything. I was planning to fetch pages in Search Console as we migrate content.Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | JimmyFritz0 -
Redirect Process for Moving a Blog
Hi, I've read several articles about the correct process for moving a blog from a subdomain to the main root domain but am not quite 100% sure as to what to do in our scenario. They were hosting their blog on Hubspot which puts the blog on a sub-domain "blog.rootdomain.com". Realizing it isn't benefiting the main website for SEO they want to move it to the main website. I understand we have to redirect the Hubspot "blog." pages to the new "rootdomain.com/blog" pages but when transferred over (it's a WordPress site) it shows the dates. So, the URL is "rootdomain.com/blog/year/month/title". They want to remove the date. Does that mean the URL must be re-written then redirected so that there's no date showing? There's over 300 posts which will have to be redirected from the Hubspot URLs. Is there a way to avoid setting up the second redirect to remove the dates or make it easier so it isn't one page at a time?
Technical SEO | | Flock.Media0 -
Moving Some Content From Page A to Page B
Page A has written content, pictures, videos. The written content from Page A is being moved to Page B. When Google crawls the pages next time around will Page B receive the content credit? Will there not be any issues that this content originally belonged to Page A? Page A is not a page I want to rank for (just have great pictures and videos for users). Can I 301 redirect from Page A to B since the written content from A has been deleted or no need? Again, I intent to keep Page A live because good value for users to see pictures and videos.
Technical SEO | | khi50 -
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 -
How to move many domains form an address to another?
We need to move a site from a domain to another one, and there are also hundreds or even thousands of subdomains to move. What would be the best practise to do it in order to save at least some of the visibility in search results?
Technical SEO | | Tulos0 -
Pros and Cons of a Single Page Forum Thread
Let's say I have a thread located at mysite.com/how-to-do-xyz and that thread has 75 posts. Let's further assume that the average post is well written and about 3-4 sentences long. For SEO purposes, do you think it would make sense to display all posts on a single page, or spread them out over 3-4 pages? Assuming I set it up for a single page, does this have any negative impact on the rare thread that is 500+ posts long? I had always thought about doing it on a single page, but then designed my forum the multi page way because that's what everyone else does. Yet, I see that SEOmoz does it the single page way, so maybe there is some validity to that. Thanks much.
Technical SEO | | PatrickGriffith0 -
Moving Duplicate Sites
Apologies in advance for the complexity. My client, company A, has purchased company B in the same industry, with A and B having separate domains. Current hosting arrangement combines registrar and hosting functions in 1 account so as to allow both domains to point to a common folder, with the result that identical content is displayed for both A & B. The current site is kind of an amalgam of A and B. Company A has decided to rebrand and completely absorb company B. The problem is that link value overwhelmingly favours B over A. The current (only) hosting package is Windows, and I am creating a new site and moving them to Linux with another hosting company. I can use 301's for A , but not for B as it is a separate domain and currently shares a hosting package with A. How can I best preserve the link juice that domain B has? The only conclusion I can come up with is to set up separate Linux hosting for B which will allow for the use of 301's. Does anyone have a better idea?
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0