We have a site which has forum on its main (index) page. The forum receives around 1000-1500 uniques on different threads. We plan to shift the forum to a forum.website.com subdomain and plans to build a static website on main page. We would like to know how would this affect the website , traffic and its SE rankings.
Thanks. Visitors comes to our forum from different urls (100s of them). Forum has thousands of pages as well. Does that mean that we have to set one redirect per page ? That would be a tough ask ... any better alternative by which we can ensure that if a visitor clicks on a link on google which points to ourwebsite.com/12345.html, he automatically gets redirected to forum.ourwebsite/12345/html . We need this setting for all pages, preferably automatically.
You can use 301 redirect, but this will help you only for the time when your old forum will be live in SERPS, when you old forum will dissappear from serps, the new forum will look like a a new site ( because it is a subdomain)
If your index page is presently a php page you can load a htm or html page and still have the both working as one site rather than split things by using a sub domain. So, in effect, build a static html site around your present design but on html pages additionally losing nothing and thus negating any worries or hassles from the equations.