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
-
404s on subfolder - how to redirect?
Hi all,
Technical SEO | | MFSMarketing
we have a lot of 404s to subfolders. Eg
www.website.com/blog-post-title/imagename/
www.website.com/blog-post-title/author/ We don't have these subfolders or blog posts anymore.
How do i redirect them? These links (404s) don't seem to have any value or backlinks. Thanks,
Stef0 -
Move from 4 Domains to 1
Hey Moz Community We are running 4 domains at the moment. www.rapturecamps.com www.surfcamp.travel www.surfcampbali.com www.surfcampinportugal.com We started of our business with 1. after a view years in business we got the option to buy the other 3 domains which have ranked quite well with certain keywords. As its quite allot of work maintaining all these websites with two languages, we where thinking of actually moving number 2, 3 ,4 all to number 1. All domains receive still some good rankings as well as daily hits. So we kinda like would like to keep the SEO Juice. Therefore we where researching for some time what would be the best practice todo so. For us there are two possible options We go trough all posts/pages on the domain 2,3,4 and copy the content over to domain 1. After thats done we create 301 redirects on the domains 2,3,4 linking them back to domain 1 posts/pages. We do do so by manually adding the 301's into the htaccess file, so we are able to delete the Wordpress installations. Our we just copy the Pages/Posts from the domains 2,3,4 to the domain 1 and then kill the 2,3,4 domains afterwords, and let google index these Pages/Posts on the new domain. This way we think we would loose the whole SEO Juice from the old domains. The reason we are asking this one here, we have been reading that this method could lead to red flags at google if we redirect to much Pages/Post back to Domain 1. Hopefully someone here can help us answer that question.
Technical SEO | | 5Gates0 -
Is this a Risky Blog Move?
I have a client who's thinking of placing their blog on a separate domain because the plug-ins and various other functionality is becoming bulky and slowing things down for the main site. There will be a 'Blog' link on the company's website navigation, just as there is now, that will take people to the blog. As an SEO person, this seems like a bad idea, even if we set up 301s from all the old posts to all the new ones. In my research I came across these two points: All backlinks to blog posts contribute directly to a website’s OVERALL SEO strength because those backlinks are pointing to your main domain. Removing them may reduce overall link juice to the site. Simply having fewer content pages on the site will cause entire site to rank lower because Google loves content-rich authority sites. Does anyone know this to be true for sure? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Caro-O
~Caro0 -
I moved to new version of GTM what about cookies for old GTM how to delete?
Hello Guys, On by website i have replaced old GTM code with new GTM code that's it! Nothing i did with GTM account. Now my referral sale is showing very high for such sites -securesuite.co.uk, clicksafe.lloydstsb.com, secure.barclaycard.co.uk I think google not understanding that visitors are coming from organic or adwords but considering it as refferal sale what should i do now? very confuse? Thanks! dev
Technical SEO | | devdan0 -
WMT Change of address when moving to subdir
A client is moving their site that has had its own domain for years to their main domain under a subdir. So, product.com is going to brand.com/product with all pages and paths staying the same, no content is being removed. We have 301 the old domain to brand.com/product however, should we also submit a change of address in Google's WMT? The reason I ask is because the site wont be located at brand.com but at brand.com/product and do not want to confuse Google, as the 301 redirects will not match the change of address exactly.
Technical SEO | | piperis0 -
Switching forum software - 301 redirects?
Hi everyone I'm working on a successful Wordpress site that also has a forum attached. The forum currently uses YAF forum software, which requires Windows hosting. The site owner wants to switch to Linux hosting. This is not a problem for WP, but it does mean that we'll need to transfer the forum to Xenforo or something similar that runs on Linux. We're OK with the technical side of this, but we're worried about the SEO implications. The URL for every forum post (more than 50,000 of them) is going to change during this transfer. It seems completely impractical to 301 each of those, so should I just 301 the URLs that have inbound links? Also, what is google's algo going to think when we suddenly have ~50,000 404s? Many thanks in advance! J
Technical SEO | | van280 -
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 -
URL length - Moving from 6 folder deep to 3 folder deep
I have a website with friendly URL, My product page are generated from a database. When I click on the product, I go 6 folders deep. (ex. nameofthesite/courses-and-seminard/blablabla-catalog/information-technology/blablabla-window/blabla-server/active-directory-with-windows-server-2008.html I'm thinking about moving the product page to the thrid folder, so it would become nameofthesite.com/courses-and-seminars/course-catalog/active-directory-with-windows-server-2008.html I want to know, would it be a major element in my SEO. Is URL length is a really important factor. Because I need to move 450 pages. Second, if I move the page, do I only need to add redirect 301 or I need to do something else. I suppose I also need to change my breadcrumb navigation also.
Technical SEO | | Adviso0