Have you ever renamed your forum?

I never renamed my forum, but I would consider it if I could get ownership of my domain without "the" in it, because then it would be shorter and more brandable.

Have you ever renamed your forum? Did you lose a lot of search engine traffic after you renamed it?

 

My DJ forum went through 3 different names in the beginning. Thanks to GoDaddy's crappy suggest a domain tool.

 

I've never renamed my forum since I started it when I was young. If I did though, I would set up 301 redirects so I wouldn't lose any traffic from search.

 

No, definitely not. The only thing that would make me want to change my name is if I got a legal notice saying that I was infringing on someone else's copyrights somehow. And even then, I wouldn't WANT to, but I would.

 

Nah. Because this would mean I would have to change my domain then starting from scratch with the PR.

 

I've thought about it a few times since in doing so, I could go for a more "brandable" name and domain (my current site name is The Voice Internet Radio, which isn't all that creative or unique...way to go, 17-year-old me), but ultimately, I haven't bothered since I don't want to deal with SEO, switching my information everywhere, etc. :/ Curse me for not being more creative a few years ago, haha.

 

My forum has went through a ton of domain name changes
but i finally found a name and a more specific niche

 

Nope. One thing I stayed true to was my forum's name. It started out with that name, and it ended up having that name when I left. I had already created so many graphics with its name on it that changing it would have been a little confusing. Besides, I'm not the creative type of guy, so I'd probably come up with the worst alternative name

 

I have. I bought MW2Forums/MW2Boards with intents to take over the Modern Warfare 2 market, but I was facing money issues, so I could not launch the site(s) until late that year, but it was too late. Not being detered by this, I went ahead and bought MW3Boards domain and used my xenforo license for it. MW2Forums into MW3Boards since MW3Forums domain was taken. I was out of luck.

Soooo, I happened to have a plan b ready. I bought CODForums the next month! Wheee!

I scrapped the original MW3Boards project and used it as a learning curve. See how much I can get. By March, I let the domain expire and I was able to move forward with CODForums!

 

How many domain name changes though? Did you use 301 redirects on all of them? Did you decide on the new names, or did your users help out?

 

idk how to do a 301 redirect
and yeah i chose the names(they pertained to the books )
i think like 7

 

What were your site's former names? If you remember.

Really? It's not that hard, here's how to do a 301 redirect:
http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

If you're doing it via .htaccess 301 here:

Unless @Monster @Brandon @Dan Hutter know of any other ways, I think those are it.

 

301 via htacess is the only way I do it. Seems to keep all your Google juice

 

I have on more than one occasion rebranded a URL for a forum. For me it was a matter of moving away from targeting a specific country to targeting all of North America which i felt was better. In the end it was more profitable from an affiliate earnings paid for American traffic. Having Canadian websites or even some euro ones didn't seem to generate nearly as much income as I had hoped. However after the rebrand and with more North American organic traffic coming in my revenue increased. Now the domain name change did affect the sale value to some degree in the end as some companies did not like the idea that the site had been rebranded but in one particular instance a company was happier that a rebrand had been done under my control as it was not something they would have to be involved with.

As for the PR and traffic flow I made sure to 301 redirect the URL to the new domain.