Gday I am developing a site I started on the forum first (wwwexample.com/forum) The forum has done very very well and is ranked very high for its keywords and has about 6k pages indexed etc. I have gone with Joomla for the homepage, there are multiple other parts of the site, classifieds, auctions, articles, directory, job site etc, all relate to the topic of the website only (horses). Now my question has to do with the wrapper funtion, when I present the forum in the Joomla wrapper it looks great and my intention is to put a permanent redirect from the original forum location to the wrapper location eg wwwexample.com/forum --> wwwexample.com/index.php/forum (the wrapper location) My quesion/s are the obvious is this the best way to do it, whill I lose my good rankings etc, is this bad SEO idea, is the iFrame invisible to google?...is there a better way to do it. Thanks in advance
If you do a permanent redirect Google should attribute your ranking across to the new location. Instead, you might consider using what is called a bridge. It allows the user/password database to be synchronized between Joomla and the Forum, depending on what program you are using for the forum. Some of them also can display the forum within Joomla. JFusion (a Joomla extension) looks promising. Btw, I love horses. I had a Polish Arabian when I was growing up.