Redirecting Homepage to Subdomain Bad or Good Idea??
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I have a very old forum that still gets a lot of traffic, but when migrating over to another software that is cloud based we cannot redirect using same domain, SO the only option would to be to change the cname on a subdomain and then REDIRECT all the traffic from the ROOT domain permanently - would this be a bad move as the root domain wouldnt be used anymore as now its just setup to be redirected in order to use the software we need to use? Domain is 17 years old.
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Both domains and subdomain are new to browse. So if you redirect the domain traffic to the subdomain, it also shares your link juice. If you do not want that platform then I think it is best, but it also affects your traffic. Because some users make the subject interesting on preview domains which may not be now
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Domain migratioins can potentially keep most of the traffic, but with something like an old forum this seems unlikely - there's going to be a lot of pages, they're very old so won't be crawled often, and as it's probably not the main focus of your business, I suspect the migration won't receive the full attention of an SEO team.
As such, I'd say this question comes down to which you value most, out of organic traffic to the forum as it stands, and completing this software migration.
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