Moving Forums to Separate Domain

[peego]

Hello,

We're planning to move our forums to a separate domain by itself. Can I get some suggestions on the best way to move our forums to a separate domain?
- Should I get current forum content removed from google 1st, then afterwards, load it up to the new domain? What's the best course of action to do this?
- How do I remove all the current forum contents from google?

The old forum will be closed down/removed, and put up on a new domain. But I don't want to have duplicated content issues or get in trouble with google.

Thanks for any suggestions and recommendations.

[thudufushi]

Well googlebot would not need to see the noindex on the forum pages if you simply removed them from their index using robots.txt disallow followed by Webmaster Tools remove pages (or directory) tool.

I still dont understand the logic of what you are saying. If you are setting something as noindex why do you still expect to get internal link benefit and presumably pagerank benefit. You dont do you? If they are 'noindex' they are no indexed so youve lost over 90% of your internal links. Am I missing something subtle?

[tedster]

There's a difference between robots,txt (crawling directives) and obots meta tag (indexing directives.) If a URL is not crawled, then there can be no PageRank flow from its internal links. But if a URL is crawled and not indexed, then the links still can flow PageRank.

Noindex means "don't show this content in the public facing results." It does not mean "don't even record this content in Google's private back end".

[thudufushi]

I follow you. But do you know that that is true (i.e. that crawled but non indexed pages will pass link equity)? Just thinking it through, why would google crawl thousands of forum pages that it doesnt intend to index because it has been told not to index?

[tedster]

I haven't tested it for a while, but the last time I did test, that was what was happening. Google has no shortage of crawling and storage resources. Even if they aren't putting URLs into the public-facing index, they mine that data for a host of things.