Best way to make a move from one site to another?NEED HELP!!!

[BlackStorm]

Hey,
Well everyone knows now about the move of www.Hosting-Talk.net to the new domain.
Now I have a question that I hope the community can help with.

What is the best way of making the move?
The main thing is the forum...

I have thought of a few things, for example:

Make an announcement in all forums and add a message to the forum header to let people know the site has changed to the new domain (lol nearly typed it there ) and also tell them that the active forum is now there.
That way they cant post but will see the announcement about the move.


Take everything off the site and just put a page up saying that the site has moved, then do a redirect to the new domain.

One thing Im thinking about is the search engine ranking...
It has gone up a good bit over the year since the domain was first bought and that will be lost when the site is moved.

What I want is to have people still coming to the site, then know that its moved, so they can go to the new site and I still have the ranking in search engines and it could help bring the other domain up in the rankings also.

Just need a few suggestions and help with how to make the move while keeping the popularity (Well as much as I can anyway )

Thanks,
John

 

[Decker]

Think I'd favour getting everything duplicated and the config's changed then lock the forum with a maintainance message & take a dump of the DB. Restore it on the new site and park the domain name (that'll keep the search engine ratings going too :cheers: ) unlock it and wait for the DNS to kick in.

A silent redirect too - or some may miss out if their DNS hasn't replicated yet.

 

[Francisco]

Well,

What I would do is "Close the Forums" I don't know if vBulletin does this, I know that Invission does it, when you enter on the Forums or click on a Topic from a Search Engine it shows the Index with a Message that you Specify and you can add a Code to Redirect

Well, that's What I would do, but since is Your Community you can do what you Preffer

BTW, Good Idea to ask the People :beathim:

 

[BlackStorm]

Yeah vbulletin does do that Francisco

Thanks for the replies!
Anyone know if closing vBulletin means that the posts wont be included in search engine searches?
Not sure if it does or it can be searched just like normal.

I know that just locking the forum instead of showing the closed forum page would solve that problem, if it was one

Thanks!

 

[GamesCreation]

Anyone know if closing vBulletin means that the posts wont be included in search engine searches?
Not sure if it does or it can be searched just like normal.

I'm pretty sure it means the posts wont be picked up by search engines, after all, one of the resons for closing it is to prevent bandwidth lost, hence you cant access any posts

 

[HS Nick]

I agree as well, i believe that the search engines willnot access the forum posts, only what is on the closed message.

 

[GamesCreation]

The only thing I'm thinking about is those html archives that Vbulletin makes