Any SEO issues with combining two forum (Not two separate forums from separate sites)

[ehmax]

Right now on my site, I have two separate forums:

1. iPod & iTunes, iPhone & Apple TV

and

2. iPad - Apple Tablet

Ultimately, I'd like to have one forum called, "All Things iOS - iPhone, iPad, iPod, Apple TV & iTunes". If renaming the main iPod & iTunes forum to this and merging the iPad forum into it, is there anything special to consider? Could this negatively effect SEO?

Thanks for any assistance.

PS... vBSEO is a great product. Working great for me. Just upgraded to latest versions of vBSEO and Sitemap generator. Google Adsense is going quite well.

[Brandon Sheley]

since you have the forum name in the forum and thread url, combing and renaming will require a full reindex of those post

[webmastersitesi]

On the seo aspect, making the url longer is not wise. You need shoter domains and make the content get frontier at SERPs. for example vbseo seo technique is siteiname.com/f4/and the thread title/ the bold part takes more attention and brings more targetted traffic to your site. When you have it like this. sitename.com/yourverylongforumname/and the thread title.html this is not going to be very attractive for searchers for click will also lose some weight at he keywords from very away from the root domain. you need to have your cvontent frontier. And thread pages are the content. Got the idea?

Furhermore when you move dontent to another rl directory this will push RESETbutton for the all that urls history. It'll take some time to rank with these urls and have them appear on serps. You need to definately use "301" url redirection from old urls to new urls to minimize potential traffic loses. Not changing url scheme is a wise thing for you to do. But you concantrate the content and the content is the king!

[ehmax]

Thanks for the replies. Any other suggestions? I really need to combine these two forums or at least change the one forum name. Anything else to minimize the impact? Has anyone else ever changed the name of one of their categories before?

[Brian Cummiskey]

I swear I replied to this thread... hrmp.

Anyway,

It really depends what you want to do as to how to do it.

If you rename both -> 1 new vs rename 1 merge other existing into it will require different rules.

Threads will auto re-direct, but you may lose some juice in the mean time.
Forums will require a manual rule that we can provide, again pending your choice of move method.

Changing the LEAST amount of things is always the best idea.