Hello, I got a client who wants to relaunch his old forum which was online since early 2000s and was online until around 2021 and then it all went offline. The original domain was lost to squatters and is unrecoverable. However the domain is blank and all indexed content from search engines has been dropped.

Client thinks about migrating to IPS and relaunching it on another domain (which at the time of speaking is already 1.5 years old). The forum has around 300k posts and 15k topics. So I don't think it would be a good idea to just one day drop the forum online and probably overwhelm and then watch Google ignore it.. I have no experience in such situations myself so I ask you what would be the wisest course of action here on how to gradually re-introduce the forums' content for search engines (Google mainly I guess).

I asked Chat GPT for advice, here's what I got. However I'm not even sure IPS Suite can do that? Can it? Client would be using IPS version 4. Any advice would be appreciated.

Since the forum is massive, you want to gradually reintroduce content rather than dumping it all at once.

Gradual Sitemap Submission

Instead of submitting a huge sitemap with 300k URLs, break it down into smaller, categorized sitemaps (e.g., by year or forum section).

Submit only a few sitemaps first, wait for Google Search Console to index them, then gradually add more.

Monitor Google Search Console > Indexing to see if Google is crawling too aggressively or not enough.

Google will only crawl the site a set amount per attempt. Our software helps prioritize certain content over others natively via robots.txt, metatags, etc... Google though has it's own internal algorithm on how and what to crawl. A site map will help guide it crawling your site but is by no means, it's only roadmap.

You, theoretically, could manually submit certain forums (or other content types) sitemaps which our software generates to search engines. I, personally, do not see much value in doing so. It may just in slow down the speed at which Google indexes content of your website with limited to no other value.

Personally, I would focus my efforts on gaining traction to the new domain, whether that is social media, emailing your previous members, other forums, etc... That will hopefully help revitalize the community and get new posts going which Google will pick up and like as it also goes through older posts.

In the end, content is king. If the content is good, Google and other search engines will crawl it and pick it up in accordance to their algorithms. Correcting errors and guiding it with our native SEO improvements should help along the way.