Sub Domain Question

[bytech]

We are having our forums moved to a subdomain address. I am a little worried about gettig flagged for duplicate content when it comes to our old URL, and the new subdomain. Anyone have any thoughts or comments that might be helpful to know?

[kwvarga]

they flag for that? well.. uh.. just move to subdir.. pray?

[John Scott]

You won't get in trouble if you do a 301 redirect. That's what I did when I moved the WF forums to this site and it worked out beautifully.

[bytech]

Ahhh the trouble is that I had a subdomain put on the directory currently in use for the forum. Is there any way to do this without having to bother the host again (they are giving e the service for free, while it normaly is a pay service)?

[Grumpus]

Whip up a little script in PHP (or whatever language the forum is written in) that checks for the URL that is being called on every page. If it's the wrong one, have PHP send the 301 to the same page on the new domain.

NEW SITE: forum.yourdomain.com
OLD SITE: www.yourdomain.com/forums/

So a call to :
www.yourdomain.com/forums/index.php?post=203

would send a 301 reditect to:
forum.yourdomain.com/index.php?post=203

A script like that is about 2 (maybe 3) lines and you would just include it in your forum header file.

G.

[I, Brian]

Originally Posted by bytech

Ahhh the trouble is that I had a subdomain put on the directory currently in use for the forum. Is there any way to do this without having to bother the host again (they are giving e the service for free, while it normaly is a pay service)?

That's a little bit odd. Is there any particular erason why you need to use a subdomain as well as a ddirectory for that??

Simply because it sounds as if you are making life difficult for yourself.

[bytech]

The sub directory is the location the subdomain name points to. So, forum.bytechcanada.net actually points to www.bytechcanada.net/forum. As far as I know, that is the way to do it?

The trouble now is that Google knows about www.bytechcanada.net/forum... when it comes by and starts following links that are now to be updated to forum.bytechcanada.net, it will start spawning the content through that, and might find the duplication over the old URL...

Trying to find a way to do this with PHP as recommended by grumpus.. I am a total novice in PHP, so maybe I can find something already writen.

[kwvarga]

[code:1:29931f6cee]<?php
Header("Location: http://forum.bytechcanada.net");
exit();
?>[/code:1:29931f6cee]