Best way to handle deletion of a forum subdomain?

[jamestown]

Hello All

Our site www.xxxx.com has long had a forum subdomain forum.xxxx.com.

We have decided to sunset the forum. We find that the 'Ask a Question' function on product pages and our social media presence are more effective ways of answering customers' product & project technical Qs.

Simply shutting down the forum server is going to return thousands of 404s for forum.xxxx.com, which I can't imagine would be helpful for the SEO of www.xxxx.com even though my understanding is that subdomains are sort of handled differently than the main site. We really tremendously on natural search traffic for www.xxxx.com, so I am loathe to make any moves that would hurt us.

I was thinking we should just keep the forum server up but return 410s for everything on it, including the roughly ~3,000 indexed pages until they are removed from the index, then shut it down.

The IT team also gave the option of simply pointing the URL to our main URL, which sorta scares me because it would then 200 and return the same experience hitting it from forum.xxxx.com as www.xxxx.com, which sounds like a very bad idea. (Yes, we do have canonicals on www.xxxx.com).

In your opinion, what is the best way to handle this matter?

Thank You

[jamestown]

Hello

Thank you for the detailed, helpful response. I should note that most of our SEO traffic does NOT come from forum pages. The overwhelming amount of natural search traffic we receive is from product detail, category, subcategory, and related (how-to articles etc) pages on the main www.xxxx.com site.

I am concerned mainly with the potential fallout of Google seeing 3000 or more 404 pages if we just delete the forum and kill the server, and am looking for the best way to handle that. I am ok with returning a 410 or redirecting anything that tries to hit forum.xxxx.com to www.xxxx.com.

What do you think?

Thanks

[effectdigital]

Something really important to note before you make any decision (of any kind) is that rankings are earned by web-pages, not (usually) by domains or websites. As such, if a large volume of your organic search traffic comes through your forum pages - prepare to lose that! Or at least... to lose a chunk of it, even if 301 redirects are handled correctly.

You want to look in Google Analytics and check out your SEO traffic data. Either go Acquisition->All Channels->Organic or view your traffic via a different dashboard and add the "organic traffic" segment to filter your data down. You should try to look at landing pages, specifically for organic search. Whilst traffic is usually represented by a line-graph along the top of most traffic-centric analytics reports, the table underneath can adapt based upon your perceived primary and secondary dimensions.

If most of your SEO ('organic') traffic is landing on forum pages, maybe closing the forum isn't such a great idea. If that's not the case, you can shut it down and implement 301 redirects t handle the fall-out. Note that 301 redirects won't insulate 100% of a lost page's SEO equity. Some amount of that authority will be transferred, but not all (in fact - none if the new content is irrelevant to the connected search queries for the old page).

My preference is to draw up a giant spreadsheet of live and historic forum URLs (historic ones can come out of GA or GSC if you extend the date ranges, there are also some clever bashes to export all URLs which the WayBack Machine holds for a given domain - though you need some knowledge of JSON arrays).

Once you have that, you can fetch metrics for all the URLs. Export traffic stats for those pages from Analytics, get other stuff en-masse (Moz PA / DA, Majestic CF / TF, Ahrefs URL rating etc) from a tool like URL Profile. Note that URL Profile won't get the metrics for you if you don't plug in various tokens and secret keys (which require subscriptions) from the data source points such as Moz or Ahrefs. It's a great tool, but it doesn't get you free access to paid data...

Once you have all the URLs alongside their associated SEO metrics, you can write a formula to 'balance' and 'normalise' those figures, boiling them down into one single "SEO Auth." metric. The URLs with high to moderate SEO authority all need 1-to-1 redirects, pointing them to **relevant **resources throughout the rest of the website. All of the weak URLs or those which have very poor SEO authority, can be 301 redirected to the homepage or the closest relevant containing category.

Once you have done all of that, you should experience minimal losses.