Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Just delete all 60 pages off the site completely and let Google sort itself it...or
Use a 301 redirect to redirect all pages of the old forum to a new index page to a new forum?
Look fowards to any advice you may have!
As usual, thanks for such a prompt reply!
Would it harm my rankings if I just deleted the forum from the site completely, leaving a 404 page?
Something I learned from Tedster: If you use a custom error page, make sure it gives a proper header response to the spiders. For this you'd want 404 Not Found or better yet 410 GONE, but definitely not 200 OK.
i was thinking of doing this first but read about it looking like "doorway pages" or something?
thanks for your help.
To fix it I used a general custom 404 page, but reading this I can see a 410 page would make more sense. The first was implemented by deleting the old pages and inserting this line in the .htaccess file:
ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.htm
That file is the custom error page. Don't use the full URL, because I think it will issue a 200 if you do. I guess a 410 page is implemented with the use of the RewriteEngine and a trailing [R=410] at the corresponding RewriteRule command.
lee_sufc, you should be able to use one 301 to redirect one folder to another, but I don't know what server type or whatever you have so you should ask a technical question in the appropriate technical forum.
Whatever you do, don't issue so many 301 redirections to one page with a content that is not similar to the old pages'.
If I want to go to the webmasterworld forum where google is discussed, that is where I want to go. Sending me to a 404 page because a thread no longer exists is bad conceptually, bad seo, and illogical. We aren't talking about redirecting a red widgets page to a forum page. We are talking of redirecting old forum pages to the new forum index.
Now, if you're talking about particular messages, I kind of agree with you too but I doubt Google does, based on what happened to my site and what they say here:
[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]
"Don't do a blanket redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it's not a good user experience. A page-to-page redirect ... is more work, but gives your users a consistent and transparent experience. If there won't be a 1:1 match between pages on your old and new site, try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content."
I'm not so sure that an error message that redirects users (not automatically) to a new domain is a better user experience than redirecting them automatically, but such seems to be Google's stance. Perhaps the best practice is to write ad-hoc pages to receive those redirections? I mean, with similar content and no other inbound links. With Lee's forum, for example, an archive of some sort could be written.
Another paragraph worth noticing from that blog post:
"If you're changing your domain because of site rebranding or redesign, you might want to think about doing this in two phases: first, move your site; and second, launch your redesign. This manages the amount of change your users see at any stage in the process, and can make the process seem smoother."
I hope I had read this before moving the site (the post was published later). Again, I'm not sure I agree with the staged process being more user friendly, but it seems to be more Google-friendly.
Additionally, "try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content" clearly makes the point that redirecting the old forum to the new forum is the way to go.
Your experience is completely different, changing domain and structure. This always results in pages starting new at PR0, and the new pages of course rank far worse. You weren't penalized. That is how it works.
"Don't do a blanket redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page ... it's not a good user experience. A page-to-page redirect ... gives your users a consistent and transparent experience. If there won't be a 1:1 match between pages ... try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content."
The last sentence doesn't mean that all pages have to be redirected. It means that, if you can't make one-to-one redirections, at least redirect to similar pages. Conceptually, an old forum message may be similar to a new forum index, but I doubt the algorithms are that sophisticated. They would just see very different text.
301 redirections pass SERPs. For my site they worked like a charm for 3 weeks or so, when suddenly SERPs were all down 150 positions or so. I can't tell if the 0 PR given after this week's update (it was N/A before) is part of a penalty or if it is due to the newness of the domain (after a month I was hoping PR to be passed), but the drop in SERPs seems to be a penalty.
Bottom line: I interpret that Google doesn't like many-to-one redirections like the one Lee is considering, where content differs significantly. If the domain is not changed and it is an established one, then perhaps penalties won't be triggered. But as long as Google sees it as a bad user experience, SERPs may suffer. I would redirect indexes and categories, they are more alike and not as many. For the individual messages I would rather let them die or, if it is worth the trouble, create archive pages (eg. one per thread) to receive those redirections.
