I have been doing SEO a while and had a site getting great traffic and good competitive rankings lets call the site www.domain.com About 6 months ago I moved to a new domain. Lets call this www.newdomain.com/forums/. Notice we also put the site on a subfolder. Now the issue is none of our competitive rankings have come back despite massive link building, 10'000's of links on top of moving the old ones. The new site still gets good traffic for sub pages that rank even better than they did for competitive stuff. We 302 redirect the root to the /forums/ and in Google our homepage is listed as the root despite it not existing. So should I be building links to /forums/ where the homepage exists or to the root as it appears Google see's this as the homepage. Alternatively I am thinking of making a real page on the root and removing the redirect so Google will be forced to index /forums/ as the homepage. Good idea? Thanks.
I probably would not have moved it if traffic was good. If you changed many existing backlinks that pointed to tld(dot)com to tld(dot)com/forums, it would look suspicious, unnatural, and/or paid. The 302 is temporary so the root will hang around in the index for a while until Google thinks its permanent. A 301 redirect would have been more appropriate to pass ranking power to the /forums page. If it is theme related, it should be ok. But your rankings for /forums may tank unless you are actively building links to that page.
It was a branding issue and had to be done, traffic is better than ever so losing a few keyprases doesn't matter too much except they brought in targeted members rather than lurkers. It was done over time and naturally. It was a 301 from root to /forums/ for 4 months but the same thing happened, Google put the root in it's index as the homepage. The main question was does Google see my root or /forums/ as my homepage and where should I build links if it is indexing the root by choice despite it not existing and having much less links pointing at it.