How would you go about this? (Not sure how to make title more descriptive)

[Crayo]

Sorry for the vague title, but I find this quite difficult to explain lol. I'm making this thread out of curiosity really. Soon, we're swapping domains and moving to a different domain as a subdomain. Okay that sentence sounds absolutely stupid for some reason, but we're basically going from wweforums.net to forums.watchwrestling.net for a variety of reasons.

If you were merging them, is that what you would do? Is it simply a case of installing Xenforo to that subdomain, getting the necessary redirects ready, and moving it? Will we take a hit to Google traffic sources when someone Googles a topic that we have covered in a thread? I don't think we will, but I'm naturally paranoid since I've worked on wweforums since 2011 on that domain. I just want to know if you lot would do the same or if there's something I am missing.

Thanks guys.

 

[Paul B]

The FAQ covers the basic steps: http://xenforo.com/community/threads/frequently-asked-questions.5183/#post-180455

 

[Crayo]

Sorry, I actually know how to technically do it, I'm just wanting opinions on the move. I'm not sure whether it'd take search engine hits and stuff. I understand I've worded this thread absolutely horribly, but being really tired and on a phone is a struggle bro.

 

[Paul B]

Well the actual move is fairly straightforward and can be achieved with minimal downtime.
Implementing redirects will obviously help with existing indexed content.

 

[Sage Knight]

One thing I can say from experience is that pairing a forum with a new CMS install on the same domain never really works out, unless you had the CMS first. Members don't show much interest since it's a different experience and neither does Google. Your forums will always rank better. It's best to just get a new domain and link the CMS on your forums and leave everything as is.

 

[ForestForTrees]

OMembers don't show much interest since it's a different experience and neither does Google. Your forums will always rank better.

Very interesting post, Sage, thanks. I will say that by setting the priority of forum pages to .5 and the priority of wiki pages to 1 in our XML Sitemaps, we've been able to get our wiki pages to rank significantly higher in Google results pages than our forum pages do. The same might also hold true for a conventional CMS.

 

[Crayo]

One thing I can say from experience is that pairing a forum with a new CMS install on the same domain never really works out, unless you had the CMS first. Members don't show much interest since it's a different experience and neither does Google. Your forums will always rank better. It's best to just get a new domain and link the CMS on your forums and leave everything as is.

The site we are merging with has a massive amount more traffic and users than our forum, and many of our users already use the service it provides (easy access to watch wrestling videos). Many of the users from the CMS said they wanted a forum to discuss wrestling on, so the plan is to merge the forum into it to make the forum even more active, and receiving much more traffic.

 

[Carlos]

The site we are merging with has a massive amount more traffic and users than our forum, and many of our users already use the service it provides (easy access to watch wrestling videos). Many of the users from the CMS said they wanted a forum to discuss wrestling on, so the plan is to merge the forum into it to make the forum even more active, and receiving much more traffic.

Does this CMS "work" with xenForo? Like, does it integrate with xenForo as if it's a native program for xenForo? Other than that. My suggestion is to leave everything as is. xenForo, from what I've experienced, and what I've been reading here at the site... xenForo doesn't play nice with sub-domains. Unless you know how to fix the problem. On top of that, sub-domains aren't treated like a "site" by google and most search engines. Leave it alone if you can.

The merge pretty much happened. WatchWrestling is already sending your WWEForums site more traffic. Nothing else needs to happen, really.

All WatchWrestling needs to do is make WWEForums.net more prominent at the top - doesn't matter where, just as long as it's being advertised on the site.
My suggestion? Put a network bar at the top everywhere on watchwrestling.ch Want to see an example? www.carlos360.com They could make a nice looking network bar with graphic(s), but the jist of it all that I'm saying is if they want this forum to be successful, as with everything else on the network - put links at the top.

EDIT: I also noticed that WatchWrestling.ch also owns other like-minded sites such as pwtalk, prowrestlingnews, and whatnot - so yeah. I think a network bar is necessary at this point.

 

[Sage Knight]

Very interesting post, Sage, thanks. I will say that by setting the priority of forum pages to .5 and the priority of wiki pages to 1 in our XML Sitemaps, we've been able to get our wiki pages to rank significantly higher in Google results pages than our forum pages do. The same might also hold true for a conventional CMS.

The site we are merging with has a massive amount more traffic and users than our forum, and many of our users already use the service it provides (easy access to watch wrestling videos). Many of the users from the CMS said they wanted a forum to discuss wrestling on, so the plan is to merge the forum into it to make the forum even more active, and receiving much more traffic.

Oh well, that does make more sense. I am no expert by any means, just sharing my thoughts on the matter.

 

[Carlos]

Oh well, that does make more sense. I am no expert by any means, just sharing my thoughts on the matter.

It doesn't matter if you're an expert or not. You are entitled to your opinions.