I signed up SEO Moz about a month ago as i'm currently rebuilding my site from scratch and wanted to learn from current mistakes.
At present I use the forum software Invision Power Board to manage my site and one thing i've learnt is that it is terrible for SEO, there are so many thousands of errors listed by the crawler that it's not even worth trying to fix it.
However because it has 5 or 6 years worth of content alot of which is on Google I don't want to totally remove it, rather I would prefer to archive it of with a big banner at the top letting anybody that visits it know that it's no longer in use and pointing them to the frontpage.
I should note that it is in a subfolder already so the location of any of the links won't be changed.
So the few questions I have are:
- The forum index has alot of link juice and I would like to redirect that to the new forum index, however for archive purposes the old index still needs to be accessible.
- Some topics are very popular and appear high in Google and have alot of backlinks. The important information in these forum topics will be available elsewhere on the new rebuilt site. Again I would like to redirect both link juice and users to the new page, however being a forum topic there are tens or hundreds of pages of old comments that need to still be accessible for reference.
- There are bound to be duplicate meta title and description issues with new similarly named categories appearing both on the new site and the old forum, is this going to be that much of a problem?
So really what i'm asking is, how should I go about archiving this of without destroying content and rankings, but still making sure that the new stuff is getting the right exposure both to users and search engines alike?