Thoughts on changing forum names

[serphog]

My forum was very well indexed, however I had to change my domain. The new domain will offer expanded coverage. Thus, now I'm considering a change in the forum names to represent the expanded coverage.

For example, instead of "Device Modifications", it would be Device & Device Modifcations or Device | Device Modifications.

It's a little scary, considering I've got a 301 redirect coming from my original domain to the new domain. Changing these forum names will make it yet another redirect (if I'm correct). However, I'm trying to think big picture and expanding the forums to include two devices could expand my members.

There is always the "common sense" approach to these changes, but wanted to survey you folks on the SEO sense. BTW, the new titles will be keyword phrase. Both device and device 2 are strong keywords.

Thanks in advance.

[Island]

If appropriate, you can use vbSEO forum slugs in the config file to keep the URLs unchanged.

But it sounds like you want the keyword in the new URLs. Thus if you're going to change the urls, I'd take some time and create appropriate permanent rewrite rules and go from olddomain.com/oldforum1name to newdomain.com/newforum1name

[serphog]

Sorry to bring up this issue again, but I'm finally making the move to bring greater organization to my forums. I'm changing a forum category.

If the existing category is old-category, accessible at http://www.mysite.com/forum/old-category and the new one is http://www.mysite.com/forum/new-category

How and where do I set up the proper redirect? cPanel? Within vBSEO?

[Oleg Ignatiuk]

You can setup this in "Custom Redirect" option in vBSEO CP:

'^old-category/(.*)' => 'new-category/$1'