How should I close my forum in a way that's best for SEO?
-
Hi Guys,
I have a forum on a subdomain and it is no longer used. (like forum.mywebsite.com)
It kind of feels like a dead limb and I don't know what's best to do for SEO. Should I just leave it as it is and let it stagnate? There is a link in the nav menu to the main domain so users have a chance to find the main domain.
Or should I remove it and just redirect the whole subdomain to the main domain? I don't know if redirects would work as I doubt most of the threads would match our articles, plus there are 700 of them.
The main domain is PR3 and so is the forum subdomain.
Please help!
-
There are two kinds of content that Google sees. One is evergreen, the other is fresh. Evergreen might be something that doesn't need to change (not all sites and pages change all the time), with fresh being the likes of articles and news. If there is a thread with good information on it, then it might still be useful.
However, if you think there are a handful of forum pages that could be redirected to main internal pages, then you can do this as well - there is no need to redirect every thread though. You could redirect 10 pages and 404 everything else.
-Andy
-
I'm just thinking because it's not being replied to, the content will never update and won't Google see it as just being "dead" content.
I'm happy to leave it if you guys think that's best.
-
If people are still reading the forum, is there then a reason you want to remove it? There is no harm in leaving it in place and it won't harm current SEO either.
-Andy
-
Hi, thanks for the replies.
We still get hits on the forum and people are reading it, but no one replies.
What's the best option for ranking and SEO. Is it to go through each one and redirect it to the most relevant article/blog on the main domain with 301's?
Should I post the links so you guys see and understand the sites better?
-
Hi,
Do people still visit the forum? If so, you can take it down, remove everything but the index and then just have a polite notice advising that the feature has been removed, and that you will be automatically redirected to the homepage in 10 seconds - that kind of thing.
However, I wouldn't advise to just 301 with there being so many pages that don't match anything else - If there is no chance it will ever be used again, I would just take it down and ensure you have a decent 404 in place. Google doesn't mind 404's where pages are no longer in use.
You don't want to 301 a forum to a site homepage where there is no forum.
-Andy
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Our clients Magento 2 site has lots of obsolete categories. Advice on SEO best practice for setting server level redirects so I can delete them?
Our client's Magento website has been running for at least a decade, so has a lot of old legacy categories for Brands they no longer carry. We're looking to trim down the amount of unnecessary URL Redirects in Magento, so my question is: Is there a way that is SEO efficient to setup permanent redirects at a server level (nginx) that Google will crawl to allow us at some point to delete the categories and Magento URL Redirects? If this is a good practice can you at some point then delete the server redirects as google has marked them as permanent?
Technical SEO | | WillyGx0 -
SEMRush's Site Audit Tool "SEO Ideas"
Recently SEMRush added a feature to its site audit tool called "SEO Ideas." In the case of specific the site I'm looking at it with, it's ideas consist mostly of suggesting words to add to the page for the page/my phrase(s) to perform better. It suggests this even when the term(s) or phrases(s) it's looking at are #1. Has anybody used this tool for this or something similar and found it to be valuable and if so how valuable? The reason I ask is that it would be a fair amount of work to go through these pages and find ways to add the select words and phrases and, frankly, it feels kind of 2005 to me. Your thoughts? Thanks... Darcy
Technical SEO | | 945010 -
My website's pages are not being indexed correctly
Hi, One of our websites, which is actually a price comparison engine, facing indexing problem at Google. When we check “site:mywebsite.com “, there are lots of pages indexed which are not from mywebsite.com but from merchants websites. The index result page also shows merchant’s page title. In some cases the title is from merchant’s site but when the given link is accessed it points to mywebsite.com/index. Also the cache displays the merchant’s product page as the last indexed version rather than showing ours. The mywebsite.com has quite few Merchants that send us their product feed. Those products are listed on comparison page with prices. The merchant’s links on comparison page are all no-follow links but some of the (not all) merchant’s product pages are indexed against mywebsite.com as mentioned above instead of product comparison page of mywebsite.com How can we fix the issue? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | digitalMSB0 -
Conversion of URL's for Readability
Reading over Rands latest Post about URL structure I had a quick question about the best way to convert URL's that don't have perfect URL structure... Current the Structure of our E-commerce store has a structure that is not friendly with domain.com/product/zdcd-jobd3d-fdoh what is the easiest way to convert these to read URL's without causing any disruptions with the SERP. Are we talking about a MOD-Rewrite in the CMS.......
Technical SEO | | CMcMullen0 -
Specific question about pagination prompted by Adam Audette's Presentation at RKG Summit
This question is prompted by something Adam Audette said in this excellent presentation: http://www.rimmkaufman.com/blog/top-5-seo-conundrums/08062012/ First, I will lay out the issues: 1. All of our paginated pages have the same URL. To view this in action, go here: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/audio-technica , scroll down to the bottom of the page and click "Next" - look at the URL. The URL is: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher, and for every page after it, the same URL. 2. All of the paginated pages with non-unique URLs have canonical tags referencing the first page of the paginated series. 3. http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher has been instructed to be neither crawled nor indexed by Google. Now, on to what Adam said in his presentation: At about minute 24 Adam begins talking about pagination. At about 27:48 in the video, he is discussing the first of three ways to properly deal with pagination issues. He says [I am somewhat paraphrasing]: "Pages 2-N should have self-referencing canonical tags - Pages 2-N should all have their own unique URLs, titles and meta descriptions...The key is, with this is you want deeper pages to get crawled and all the products on there to get crawled too. The problem that we see a lot is, say you have ten pages, each one using rel canonical pointing back to page 1, and when that happens, the products or items on those deep pages don't get get crawled...because the rel canonical tag is sort of like a 301 and basically says 'Okay, this page is actually that page.' All the items and products on this deeper page don't get the love." Before I get to my question, I'll just throw out there that we are planning to fix the pagination issue by opting for the "View All" method, which Adam suggests as the second of three options in this video, so that fix is coming. My question is this: It seems based on what Adam said (and our current abysmal state for pagination) that the products on our paginated pages aren't being crawled or indexed. However, our products are all indexed in Google. Is this because we are submitting a sitemap? Even so, are we missing out on internal linking (authority flow) and Google love because Googlebot is finding way more products in our sitemap that what it is seeing on the site? (or missing out in other ways?) We experience a lot of volatility in our rankings where we rank extremely well for a set of products for a long time, and then disappear. Then something else will rank well for a while, and disappear. I am wondering if this issue is a major contributing factor. Oh, and did I mention that our sort feature sorts the products and imposes that new order for all subsequent visitors? it works like this: If I go to that same Audio-Technica page, and sort the 125+ resulting products by price, they will sort by price...but not just for me, for anyone who subsequently visits that page...until someone else re-sorts it some other way. So if we merchandise the order to be XYZ, and a visitor comes and sorts it ZYX and then googlebot crawls, google would potentially see entirely different products on the first page of the series than the default order marketing intended to be presented there....sigh. Additional thoughts, comments, sympathy cards and flowers most welcome. 🙂 Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
How to create site map for large site (ecommerce type) that has 1000's if not 100,000 of pages.
I know this is kind of a newbie question but I am having an amazing amount of trouble creating a sitemap for our site Bestride.com. We just did a complete redesign (look and feel, functionality, the works) and now I am trying to create a site map. Most of the generators I have used "break" after reaching some number of pages. I am at a loss as to how to create the sitemap. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | BestRide0 -
Best way to handle pages with iframes that I don't want indexed? Noindex in the header?
I am doing a bit of SEO work for a friend, and the situation is the following: The site is a place to discuss articles on the web. When clicking on a link that has been posted, it sends the user to a URL on the main site that is URL.com/article/view. This page has a large iframe that contains the article itself, and a small bar at the top containing the article with various links to get back to the original site. I'd like to make sure that the comment pages (URL.com/article) are indexed instead of all of the URL.com/article/view pages, which won't really do much for SEO. However, all of these pages are indexed. What would be the best approach to make sure the iframe pages aren't indexed? My intuition is to just have a "noindex" in the header of those pages, and just make sure that the conversation pages themselves are properly linked throughout the site, so that they get indexed properly. Does this seem right? Thanks for the help...
Technical SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Best way to display maintenence mode on a website?
I have a website with lots of traffic and sometimes the backends fail. I want to use lighttpd to show that the website is under mantenence and should be back up shortly. I was thinking of using Soft 503 errors or doing a 302 for every page to /maintenance.html. What would you do (besides fixing the backends, we are already doing that :P) to avoid hurting your SEO efforts? Thanks in advance Mariano
Technical SEO | | marianoSoler980