moving a forum to a new domain

how to deal with moving a large forum to a successful site

[rrussell]

Here's the skinny - Due to a corporate naming change, a company is consolidating two sites(A & B). All of the content on site A is going to be merged with and placed on the domain of site B.

A large component of the content shift will be a user forum with around a thousand threads. Site B previously did not have a forum, and only has about 250 pages indexed in google.

My concern is that adding this much brand new content overnight could induce penalties from google. The site does pretty well in its niche of organic rankings now, and I want to maintain that.

What would you do if it were your site? I am leaning towards just putting a ban in robots.txt for spiders to play it safe, although the fresh, dynamic content would be nice to have. I'm also worried about duplicate content issues since the forum was on another domain previously.

Has anyone gone through something like this? Any ideas or results from someone who has gone through something similar are appreciated.

[Sweet Cognac]

Is site A older than site B?

Will you be putting the forum inside a folder on site A or a subdomain?

I don't think there will be a problem. Just make sure your 301 is correct, and that all links are working properly.

[rrussell]

Site A has been online since '04, site B since '02...

The plan was to put the forum in /forum or something similar on Site B.

So you don't think that's too much content to drop in overnight?

Would starting a new subdomain lessen the risk?