Moving Forums - Save SE Ranking?

Hey, I've been lurking for a while, but this is my first time posting, so I appreciate your help.

I run a forum that's finally taken hold in search engines, but now I need to move my forum to another directory on the server, and I don't want to lose all the search engine links.

I'm moving it from http://www.domain.com/forums/
to the root directory at http://www.domain.com

But I don't want the search engine to keep trying to link to http://www.domain.com/forums/thread1234.html and lose all that traffic.

Is there anything that can be done, or that needs to be done, to ensure I don't take any search engine penalties during this transition?

Thanks. Smile

 

Unfortunately there's nothing you can do about it...if you know you are going to move eventually, you might as well do it as soon as you can. The longer you wait, the worse it is going to get.

There might be some sort of fancy redirect you could set up, but I don't know of any...you might just have to bite the bullet and do it.

 

you can use some redirects to save the traffic ans search rankings

I'd like to be more helpful, but I'm not any good in coding, hopefully someone will come and give you a better advice

 

You could probably redirect http://www.site.com/forum and http://www.site.com/forums/ to www.site.com. Then on your 401 page add your main site www.site.com and possibly a site map page on the 401 page too.

You might consider doing a Google Sitemap xml file once you move the forum.

Regardless you are going to be in Pagerank limbo for a few weeks.

 

Though I can't tell you how to do it, I pretty sure you can set up a redirect using htaccess:

would redirect domain.com/forum/xyz to domain.com/xyz

Sorry I can't tell you how to do it.

 

A simple redirect might help a little bit, but not much. What a redirect is going to do, as far as I know, is send visitors/spiders from your old threads to your new forums - not threads....so they won't be able to find the thread they were looking for, but at least they will be in your forums.

 

The redirect I'm thinking of would redirect all traffic from /forums to the exact same url at the root folder, meaning that visitors would be redirected to the proper thread, etc.

I believe the info you need is at http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess7.shtml
"You can also redirect an entire directory by simple using Redirect /olddirectory http://yoursite.com/newdirectory/"

I think that will do it, but not certain.

 

Ah, ok, you might be right there...I've never done that kind of thing and forgot that it's not as if the entire URL's are changing - they will be the same general paths, only in a different directory.

 

Hey, sorry to bump this thread again, but I'm still working on it.

I think I've pretty much decided I want to setup my home page at:

http://www.mysite.com

to redirect to:

http://www.mysite.com/forums/

So when someone visits the main page, they're looking at the forums, eliminating the useless fluff of the homepage.

My question now is what is the best way for me to do this, while maintaining my PR and backlinks? My homepage is 1PR above my forums currently. I've heard horror stories about using a 302 redirect, and I'm afraid this would be an improper use of a 301...

I do have an example though, which seems to be similar to what I want to do. If you go to http://blogger.com (PR10 site), there's a 301 redirect to www.blogger.com. I already have a 301 from domain.com to www.domain.com on my site. However when you request www.blogger.com, it uses a 302 redirect to bounce you to http://www.blogger.com/start. Could this be the correct way, since it seems very similar to what I'm looking to do?

Our site, being community based, relies on getting new members almost entirely from SE results, so it's critical I don't lose our ranking.

Thanks!

 

why not just put a cover page at mysite.com?

look at how offtopic.com does it

 

Isn't there any downside to the PR on that?

For example, if 100% my backlinks are to www.domain.com, then wouldn't www.domain.com/forums/ be one PR down, because of the drop per click, or something like that? Do you know what I'm trying to say?

Kinda like how www.slashdot.org is PR9, but most sublinks from it's homepage are PR8...

 

does PR matter that much?

 

Our favoribility with the search engines, especially Google, is how we get all our new members and traffic right now, so yes it is.

 

i'm not 100% sure that's based on your PR alone....

and what's better, members finding a page where it describes what the site is than a random thread where they have no idea what's going on?