Med-Psych.com

[george]

I just wanted to relay some of my recent experiences with moving forum threads from an old site to a new domain. I had an old site with threads that were mostly not ranking well as the old domain seemed to have some kind of penalty for a few years. Also, the forum software was very outdated and no longer supported. After much consideration I decided I would give phpBB a try, using some SEO mods I've seen.

The first step was to convert the old forum threads to phpBB3. It took a bit of doing, but eventually I found a script that seemed to convert the threads to phpBB2, which I could then import to phpBB3. I added the SEO mods I wanted and then set-up the new phpBB forum on a different domain (which actually seems to be fairly well established already for the limited information I have on the new domain.

I also reviewed an article I found on the official Google Blog taling about best practices when moving a site. It gave a lot of food for thought. I didn't think I could follow all of the recommendations as I didn't want to move the old forum to the new domain using the old software, as the old software is not even fully working as it isn't compatible with many of the server upgrades that have happened over the years. It also isn't easy to move a forum one section at a time.

So here's what I've decided to do. I've gotten the new forum software (phpbb3 with SEO mods) up and running on the new domain, and I've imported the old forum content. I've 301 redirected a few of the old threads to the corresponding threads on the new site. On the new site, in order to keep search engines from spidering all of the new forum, I've used Disallow commands in the robots.txt file, only allowing spiders to pick up the forum index and the few pages that have 301 redirects pointing towards them.

I did this within the past week, and of the few 301 redirects, it appears 1 of them has already been picked up by Google and the new domain is ranking pretty well - and the old forum thread is no longer showing up in Google. The other threads that were redirected are not yet showing up.

Moving an entire forum could potentially cause a few problems. First, I'm worried about the duplicate content issues - I'm basically moving a large amount of information from one site to another, with identical content other than some minor formatting differences between the two forum scripts. Second, I'm worried about adding too much content on a domain at one time. While it isn't clear, it does seem that Google has some factors in its algorithm that may discount or filter sites that add too much new content at one time. I'm hoping the 301 redirects of only a few threads at a time will avoid both duplicate content and adding too much new information at once.

If anyone has any comments or questions, I'd be curious to hear what you have to say.

[george]

It looks like perhaps googlebot snagged a redirected URL before I had added it to the robots.txt file as one that is allowed to be spidered. I had to do some unusual things in my robots.txt file on the new domain in order to keep googlebot out of all newly added forum pages except those that I've redirected. When I use the Google Webmaster tools, the robots.txt analyzer shows that the new url should be allowed to be spidered. It is interesting that in the Webmaster tools, it shows that the new URL was blocked by robots.txt on the new domain, and on the old domain it shows that the old URL was blocked by robots.txt - yet it was the new URL blocked on the new domain - kinda interesting. Hopefully that'll get straightened out fairly quickly, as I'd like to redirect a few more of the old threads to the new domain.

At least it looks like I haven't lost any rankings with the way the move was done. I do know that as Google ads filters, it may start dropping in the rankings, so time will tell.

[george]

Everything seems to be working okay with the forum move. So far I have only "allowed" 4 of the moved URL's on the new domain in my robots.txt and all 4 of those URL's are now listed on the new domain. Three of the URL's are no longer listed on the old domain in Google, but one of them appears to be showing up on both domains - that is a little concerning, but the old domain has a cache date of a few weeks ago. Hopefully the next time it spiders that URL, it'll drop out of Google on the old domain as it is 301 redirected properly to the new domain.

Also of interest is that for at least one of the URL's, the backlinks that were pointing to the old domain are now being credited to the new domain when I check in the Google Webmaster tools. I will go ahead and start transferring more URL's, a few at a time, as time allows. It is obviously a tedious process, but I think it'll be worth it in the long run.

[george]

Everything continues to work fine. 10 threads are indexed on the new site and the rankings don't seem to be much affected on the new site's older threads. The threads moved from the old site seem to be ranking about as well as they did on the original site. I've gone ahead and 301 redirected the rest of the threads indexed in google and I'm removing any robots.txt restrictions on the new site. We'll see soon enough if the adding of too many threads at once will cause any sorts of problems.