Moving Message Board

[SEO2Go]

Hello everyone.

Since our site has grown, I have decided to separate our message board from the rest of our site by moving it to another domain. I'm moving it from a .com site to a .net site with the same domain name.

My question is, what is the best way to redirect the message board from the .com to the .net. It is a very established board that has a lot of links on the SERPS. Is there a way to make sure that anyone finding an old thread on the Internet will go to the NEW site, rather than getting a 404 error? I cannot possible redirect every thread manually, as there are thousands. Will redirecting the index.php be enough?

Thanks in advance.

[SEO2Go]

Okay. I guess I'll just permanent redirect the /index.php and hope for the best.

[encyclo]

Hi, you'll need to redirect all the pages using mod_rewrite, assuming it is available on your server. The redirect must be a 301 Permanent Redirect. Otherwise, you will certainly have serious indexing problems as your old URLs will disappear.

You can see some good examples of how to organize the redirect in the Apache forum library [webmasterworld.com].

If you are not on a server running Apache, it may still be possible to redirect the site. What server platform are you using?

[SEO2Go]

I do have mod_rewrite capabilities. I am using cPanel, and all I've done so far was a permanent redirect on the /forums and /forums/index.php to the new site. Since this is a message board with tens of thousands of posts, how can I redirect every thread? Is there a redirect that will blanket the entire directory (which is /forums/)?

Thanks again for the advice. I appreciate it.