Integtraing a content site with a different domain?

My site right now is currently just a forum without any material non-forum content. I am considering purchasing an existing site that is pure expert type content in my forums niche. The site is almost like an encyclopedia on the niche with hundreds of pages of content. The domain itself has a Google pagerank of 5 and the interior content pages are all high pagerank from 3-5 on individual pages. I don't know traffic specifics but I do know the domain has an Alexa rank of about 110,000 and it is not a webmaster or any other high Alexa toolbar use niche or Geographical location. In fact if anything the Niche probably has one of the lowest uses of the Alexa toolbar in general.

Would it make sense to buy this site and add all the pages to the CMS of VB4? I would 301 all the individual URL's to their new place in the VB4 CMS and either 301 the root domain to my domain or to mydomain.com/index of article content I just bought.

If I did that I know there would be an immediate hit to search engine rankings but would the content quickly regain the authority it had? My domain is ten years old so it won't be like I'm moving it to a brand new domain. Would all the links that are pointing to the old now 301'd location carry the same weight as a link directly to the new location for seo purposes?


I just fear that I will be paying a premium for the existing site but will knock it's usefullness down by moving the content.

Steve, you're not showing as a vbseo customer. Please supply me with your license details (via pm) so i can assign your license to your user account.

Thanks.

I'm not a customer yet. My forum is still phpbb and I will be migrating to VB4 when it's gold and purchasing VBseo 3.5 when it is released.

Hi Steve,

Glad to hear you will be joining us in the near future. A side note, I'm not sure that the Impex tool will be ready for vb4 right away for software conversions. You'll likely have better (faster?) luck installing 3.8.4, impexing in from phpbb, and then upgrading to vb4 from vb 3.8.4 and then installing vbseo 3.5

To your question at hand, you basically have 3 options:

1) move content to vb CMS on your forum domain
Doing this, your forum will gain the content strength, but it will effectively need to start over the entire indexing process and you will lose a lot of ranking and links-in. How long it will take to get re-indexed or rank well, no one can tell you. It's really out of anyones hands except the search engine themselves. The ideal solution would be to set up 301's on the current domain for each article to the new location. However, there likely won't be a good programmatic way to automate it, so it will be a 1-by-1 rule process that will take a lot of time to set up. Additionally, you will need to retain the domain for as long as you want the old links to it from other forums/non-search engines/etc out there to function. (added cost for domain fees, and possibly hosting)

2) leave content on current domain, link to it from forum
Using this method, your forum won't gain the good page weight and links in and content that the articles provide. Cross-linking between the 2 is a given, but it still only takes you so far.

3) put your forum on the content domain.
This is what i would do with 1 exception... if your current domain is a 'brandable .com". If it's just XYZ forums, you have no branding image to maintain. If it's "Acme Pens", it gets tricky as you will lose the branding and be forced to take on the possible purchase branding site's name.

Since you will be converting, you'll be under-going a re-indexing process anyway. We have a tool to 301 impex urls to their new destination. The current forum domain can just pass to the site domain/$1 (where /$1 is everything after the .com) and then vbseo will re-direct it to its correct location on the forum.

The content site stays as is with its rank, your forums and threads are auto-redirected.... it's the best way to do it, as long as the branding is something you (and your users) are ok with making the switch to.