Advice on buying a forum, merging content with another domain and redirects?

[surfsup]

I currently have a forum that I might purchase and looking for advice on what would be the best route to go on this.

I'd like to purchase this forum which is Vbulletin 4 but put all the content, members, etc. on my existing domain and re-direct everything from the purchased to the other domain.

1. Would that be the route to go or is there any steps I am missing?
2. How long should I keep the domain up before not renewing the purchased domain? I want to point any old urls to my existing forum.
3. Would this route be best for SEO to give my site more of a boost or what would be best?

 

[surfsup]

Nobody?

 

[Wildcat Media]

I've never done this (although I'm considering it for a niche forum I'm thinking of making an offer on).

But here is something to ponder. When I upgraded from vB 3.7 to XF on our big board, I didn't want to lose any of the old traffic. I put redirect rules into htaccess, and within 36 hours of the conversion I was already seeing the updated links on Google. So, done correctly, Google should pick up any redirects. I'd keep the old domain at least one renewal cycle, if not two.

One thing to consider is that on the forum you are purchasing, there are likely links in the forum's posts pointing to other posts or threads in the forum, and those will break if you don't hold onto the old domain. Either that or you need to write a good script to modify all of those posts to create a new, correct link. On our upgrade, we did not change domains at all, so we do not have to worry about the old links not working.

You might want to hang onto that domain permanently, though. I've lost a few domains over the years, only to find squatters/speculators had bought them up. It is a negative stigma to know that past visitors will come across a domain squatter site or worse, someone could buy up the domain when it becomes available and do something nasty with it (create a competing site, create a negative site against yours...anything that might try to take traffic away from your site).