Your Thoughts on Redirect Pages?

[DJ5A]

Hello Everybody:

I know most of you dislike Redirect Pages, Please tell me Your thoughts on what I've done & Plan on Doing! Please bare with me while I explain it! :)

The Old Forum was using a MS Access DB & Soon it would be giving me errors due to traffic & it was part of a Highly Listed Domain. So I decided when I upgrade the Forum Software that I would get a Separate Domain Just for the Forum alone.

1. I have a Industry Specific Targeted Forum that gets fairly good Traffic (200K Page Views a Month) & a Very Good Google Rankings #1 - #2 Positions, #1 Position goes straight to the main & most popular Forum. #2 goes to the Forums Default Home Page.

I placed a Redirect Page that automatically sends them to my new Forums with the New URL in 5 seconds on the forum that has the #2 Ranking on the Default Page!

The reason I've done this is, I contacted all my Members & told them about it over 14 days ago, I even had a Large Message on the top of all pages about the forum being relocated & 10 days later I still had more Members & Visitors at the Old Locked Forum than my new forum, this is why I placed a Redirect page there & it's working so far...

But since everybody likes the old one so much, I will leave it locked, so it can be used as a Information Resource, I plan on only Running the redirect a Few days at the time & leave it locked hoping they like the old one & mosey over to the new one! I've seen plenty of Redirects Listed on Google! Anybody has any thoughts on this?


2. Also I noticed with the new forum, that I'm getting about 10% 404 Errors. If it was less than about 5% or so I wouldn't worry, but 10% is a lot to me & I was thinking about Putting a Auto Redirect Page to put them back to the New Forums Home Page? What do Y'all think?

[Dan0]

It doesn't sound like you're doing anything deliberately deceptive there, but I'd worry about how search engines might interpret the intent.

If you're going to leave the old forums locked but accessible, then you could just put a very prominent link on them that explains:
-> why you have a new URL (had to upgrade due to popularity and high traffic)
-> why you're leaving the old forums online (a vast library of useful information)
-> where to click!

The alternative is to plant a 301 Moved Permanently redirect on the old forums' main URL, and provide links back into the old content from some page on your new domain. This might be a little tricky, but it's probably the simplest way to push folks to your new forums. That way folks can go visit the old forum content if they need to look at something, then click on the 'home page' links to go back to the new forums.