Swtich my CMS vbulletin 4 homepage to Wordpress Homepage?

Hey everyone I need some advice from the experts on this... I have a vbulletin 4 forum and am using the CMS as my homepage with vbulletin installed in the root directory.

I am liking the layout better of a Wordpress homepage after seeing many other wordpress / vbulletin websites and really like how they create a wordpress preview which links to the forum topic. Also I have been working at the site for well over a year and the CMS homepage is like on page 8 of Google while all my forum threads are on page 1, 2 and 3 off Google...

My forum and thread posts are rockin doing really well with Google with the combo of vbseo.

At the moment I have been told there is no good bridge for vbulletin 4 with wordpress homepage, but at the moment its not a big concern for me. I would like to setup the homepage basically with constant forum updates (using a photo and link) to that forum page. Would be nice to have a bridge down the road possibly.

So whats the best way to go about making this switch over being that I have all the vbulletin files directly in the root???

I have been told I will need a forums folder (not in root) and to install the wordpress software in the root, using a different database for each software...

All and ANY suggestions by everyone here will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Moving your entire forum for the sake of adding in word press is probably the worst thing you can do, as you will lose all your good ranking forum pages in the process of redirection to /folder.

I'd suggest staying where you are.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

Moving your entire forum for the sake of adding in word press is probably the worst thing you can do, as you will lose all your good ranking forum pages in the process of redirection to /folder.

I'd suggest staying where you are.

I completely understand what you're saying Brian and I would agree with you on a site that is primarily used for the forum and has alot of well ranking forum pages. In that case you are right it would not be worth changing especially if a site is getting lets say at least 100+ visitors per day.

This particular site I am doing however is not the case. You know from reading all my posts in the past for this site I am mainly using for the vBulletin content management system. My most important pages are literally the CMS articles, the forum is just an additive if I can get people to talk in there.

There is basically no one talking in the forum its a Real Estate site where our goal is to show featured properties, sold homes, community help, etc. On average the site gets 3-10 hits of people a day. Yes a day. So after a year of working at it and doing everything recommened for best SEO, it seems a year is plenty time to consider a change right?

I am yet to see any real changes from the CMS in rankings. 3-10 visitors a day is, well... You see my point?

In the case of 3-10 hits a day, I'd say just about anything is fair game

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

In the case of 3-10 hits a day, I'd say just about anything is fair game

Thanks man I'm glad you can feel my pain now . After a year of this its been a bit, well, you can only imagine...
but oh well, you live you learn, its all in how you react to things which makes who you are, so with that said time to get to work on this.

Can you offer me the best play by play on how to do this major changeover properly through this forum thread or should I open a support ticket?

Thanks

Word press is beyond our support realm. You're looking at a manual effort of moving the forum up to a folder
moving forum from root to /forum redirect
And then converting all your articles into word press.

Ok I understand, but is there a way to like re-direct all the good indexed pages that are in the Google system with 301 redirects once I switch things over, or something like that of somesort?

You'll need to redirect each item mnaually in the htaccess file

Code:

redirect 301 /old/ http://www.mysite.com/new/

and this of course should come before the wordpress rules, but after rewrite engine on