Sheffielder Posted June 10, 2020 Share Posted June 10, 2020 I've got a long standing forum that's been there for years. (can't remember but early 2000's) It's very well established I'm getting annoyed though by the page redirection that goes: www.website.comhttps://www.website.comhttps://www.website.com/forums/ This also affects my site speed and I'm keen to eradicate this by moving from website.com/forums to website.com Question is though - how would this affect my standing with Google, SEO etc? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jonathan R Posted June 10, 2020 Share Posted June 10, 2020 I can't claim to be an expert in SEO but I don't see much downside for your homepage. Any external links to now point to http://website.com/forums will still work, though they will direct people to the forums feed rather than the homepage. l still think that all of the "link-juice" should still be okay though you may have a weird situation where your forums rank higher than your home page. There could be a bigger problem though if this changes all of the urls to posts, articles etc depending on your current url structure. For eg if you have an external link to http://website.com/forums/forums/topic/thisisthepost and you then lose that middle /forums/forums from the url without a redirect, the link will show up as broken and you won't get any SEO benefit from it. If you are able to keep existing urls or redirect them, then you should be fine. Anyhow, that's my non-expert 2c worth. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
opentype Posted June 10, 2020 Share Posted June 10, 2020 40 minutes ago, Sheffielder said: www.website.comhttps://www.website.comhttps://www.website.com/forums/ The first step is somewhat unnecessary. Other than that I wouldn’t worry too much about it. An instant server redirect is hardly noticable for users and for bots (like search engines) it is more a theoretical problem. If you instruct search engines that /forums/ is your real homepage, then they will accept that don’t bother with the redirect any longer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaBeach_Guy Posted June 10, 2020 Share Posted June 10, 2020 (edited) It's funny that you asked this now, I've actually been considering the opposite, though instead of https://www.website.com/forums/, I would do https://boards.website.com or https://forum.website.com But I don't know how simple that king of move would be or how it may harm SEO by changing it from its current URL method. Edited June 10, 2020 by VaBeach_Guy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sheffielder Posted June 10, 2020 Author Share Posted June 10, 2020 53 minutes ago, opentype said: The first step is somewhat unnecessary. Other than that I wouldn’t worry too much about it. An instant server redirect is hardly noticable for users and for bots (like search engines) it is more a theoretical problem. If you instruct search engines that /forums/ is your real homepage, then they will accept that don’t bother with the redirect any longer. Would it affect page loading speeds though? Do you think I'd see a benefit from not having a redirect going on? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sheffielder Posted June 10, 2020 Author Share Posted June 10, 2020 URL Time Spent (Initial: http://www.website.co.uk/) 0 ms https://www.website.co.uk 630 ms /forums/ (www.website.co.uk) 480 ms This is what I'm seeing on speed tests hence why I'm thinking to move the forums to the root of domain? Unless there's some way to eradicate the hopping between root, https and then forums URLs? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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