Moving a Large Forum (Big Board) to a new domain name?
 

Has anyone ever moved a large forum from one domain name to a completely different one? One of my big boards was originally added as just part of an ecommerce website, and grew to such a large size that it is more important than the ecommerce site itself. Adding things like classifieds, etc seems strange to do under the current domain name. However, I realize that moving it could cause giant problems with regards to search engine listings and future rankings. Has anyone gone through this or have any thoughts about this?

Another possibility is to keep the forum as is, but add extra items (such as classifieds) to a new domain but still somehow integrate the user lists across domains (which is easy on the same domain but may be difficult across domains). Some of the high-end classified software integrates with vbulletin but specifically says not across different domain names -- or perhaps they just don't know how to do it?

Ideas/Suggestions/Experiences?

-vissa

Hello Vissa,

I have found in my experience that domain moving will hardly make a difference for search engine references at all, before you know it your dynamic meta`s will have transferred over from domain to domain via these "great search engines databases" i recently moved from Domain A-B and before i knew it google for example was already matching the new domain, some of the older links "threads in forums" were at the start matching to old domain but again within a matter of weeks and in general "people hitting these links" the search engiens now are so dynamic its very good for your intended move so i certainly wouldn`t worry about that at all.

You will definitely lose your search engine ranking due to loss of page rank as you will lose all the page links to your old domain. But with time you will regain these as people learn of the new domain. It may take a while though.

What you will need to do is set up a 301 (Permanent redirect) from the old domain to the new domain. The new domain will then inherit the old domain's PR and possibly the search ranks as well.

Note:You will have to try out some variations with 301 re-directs to make it perfect, before you have completely setup your domain change.

Above code, should help make all the URLs for oldomain properly 301 to newdomain.

Do you think that would be the case even using 301 redirects?

-vissa

To be honest, I don't know - the last time I did this was 6 years ago and I didn't use redirects.

yes, you will take a hit. the old domains will take time to bleed from the SE cache and the new ones will take a while to get in, giving you soft middle ground that you must fix with the 301 redirect. I found it lasted about 3months. Install the vBSEO sitemap generator and get it submitting.