Will an active forum on our domain help with rankings by fresh content?
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We have a very large ecommerce store with little fresh content being added, accept through a web blog on the sub domain.
We are thinking of moving over our blog that is on another domain entirely and has a lot of active users. But first I want to make sure it will actually help the domains rankjings, and second i'm concerned about the duplicate content on the old forum if we move it to the main domain.
Should we just copy over all the content, 301 the old forum URL's to the new ones?
Thanks much!
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The forum or blog could improve rankings if it is on the same domain and attracts links from other websites.
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Forums get crawled pretty regularly. Whilst this wont help your ranking, it will mean that if you add a new product and theres a link to it in a discussion it may get indexed quicker. As Daniel said above, every little helps!
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Fresh content does little to anything to help your rankings. If you want to show up in news or discussion results, then fresh content can be good. Otherwise, having a forum or blog on your site won't do much to help a random product page in your store rank better.
If you want, and you should, move your blog from your subdomain to a subdirectory of your main domain. Then at least you are consolidating your content and link juice. Copy it and 301 the orld url's to the new ones. It may not do much to boost rankings, but every little bit can help.
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