Install to root or /forums/?

[diyAudio]

Our forums have always been located under /forums/. We use VBA, and the forums are the main website function. About to install VBSEO, would we be best served to move the forum to the web root or keep it in /forums/ in terms of SEO benefits? I have read several threads here with no apparent consensus, but all things being equal what would you do?

[Mert Gökçeimam]

Hello Jason ,

I prefer to keep all my forum installations on root as it allows bots to browse one less folder name. Also it is easier for end users to type without forum. You can do hwat we use within vBSEO.com

We have our installation within root and we renamed vbulletin index.php to forum.php and added a CRR to display forum.php as forums. We also use vBadvanced as index file on vbseo.com

[Brandon Sheley]

I like to use a sub-forum or sub-domain, which give you the freedom of placing whatever CMS you want in the root.
As long as you have links from your root page to your forum, and have your sitemap in google webmaster tools, google won't find any problem finding your content.
Also backlinks to the forum itself and inner pages will help tremendously.

[webwizzy]

If your site is 99% or even 90% forum, then ROOT.

[Brian Cummiskey]

if your site IS the forum, it should go in the root. Sure, you can add on pages/articles/etc, but those are likely lesser areas of view. and like mert says, you can always make a homepage with the forum still being in root.

Plus, with vb/vbseo in root, you can use the power of vbseo's CRR's to re-write your sub pages of the forum. htaccess works UP, not down. so, /articles can be re-written using CRR's if your forum is installed in root.

[Michael Biddle]

if your site IS the forum, it should go in the root. Sure, you can add on pages/articles/etc, but those are likely lesser areas of view. and like mert says, you can always make a homepage with the forum still being in root.

Plus, with vb/vbseo in root, you can use the power of vbseo's CRR's to re-write your sub pages of the forum. htaccess works UP, not down. so, /articles can be re-written using CRR's if your forum is installed in root.

This is what I would go with as well.

[TheGavin]

We have our installation within root and we renamed vbulletin index.php to forum.php and added a CRR to display forum.php as forums. We also use vBadvanced as index file on vbseo.com

I'm new to these custom rewrite rules... could you explain exactly how to do this?

Thanks.

[Brian Cummiskey]

The basics of it is that you can take a dynamic link (page.php?id=123) and convert it using the crr systax into a static-appearing url (page/123/) using a simple regular expression style rule in the vbseocp.php control panel.

'^page\.php\?id=(\d+)$' => 'page/$1/'

\d is a digit variable (in order, so it turns into $1. if multiple, you would have $2, $3, etc. The parenthesis make the variable, so every id that fits that rule will get its own custom folder name based on the id.

[TheGavin]

So if I added

RewriteRule '^forum\.php\' => 'forum/'

to my .htacces, the url "www.asdf.com/forum.php" would be changed to "www.asdf.com/forum"?

[Brian Cummiskey]

yup. This is exactly what vbseo.com uses. notice the forum home here is /forum but all threads are not in that 'directory'

[TheGavin]

after I added that to .htaccess I get a 500 error for every vbulletin page.

[Brian Cummiskey]

Wrong place

This goes into the Custom Rewrite Rules block in the vbseocp.php control panel (about 3/4 of the way down), not in the htaccess file.

[TheGavin]

Perfect! Thanks for the help!