Change my URL

I am looking at changing my URL from alpharadiotv.com/forum to alpharadiotv.com and I wanted to check what effect this will have the pages already crawled by google. Nothing else will change except the URL.

Any help will be appreciated.

You would need to put a custom 301 redirect in place to do the transfer, but I would expect it to have some negative impact initially.

I would not advise this unless it is absolutely necessary or you are a new forum not yet established and receiving only minimal traffic.

The main reason why i want to change this is because it looks like when google wants to crawl my forum, it also first look at the root and because I do not have so much at the root, i just wanted to change once and for all the url to the root. The forum is relatively new and I would rather feel changing it now would be better than later. If however you feel that may not be need to change at all, That is fine as you have more experience than me in this field.

Or may be my question should be, is there any adverse effect in using /forum rather than the root url. Any advantage or effect as it may apply?

Thanks.

Using /forum/ takes you 1 level of depth away from the root, but I do not believe this is going to have significant impact.

You are correct about your current situation. If your homepage is lacking of real content, it's best to simply setup the forum to display at root.

How long has your forum been online & what volume of search traffic do you get now?

Its been a month or so now. Traffic for me is been pretty small but I will think vbseo and few changes that I have made and may be with an increase in my experience as to how things really work has helped me as compared to my first forum. I will say with few more things to change as to your recommdation here - Critique Please . I have implemented some of your comments and I can really see the result and am working on others as well. I am pretty confident that with more hard work, things will be more progressive in the near few months or so.

Thanks.

Glad to hear that Samuel. It's surprising how such a minor set of changes can really have significant impact, but they do.

Thanks. So I will assume its better for me to change to the root url.

Regards.

If you plan on operating the forum primarily and have no immediate plans to add anything substantial at the root level, then yes.

Thanks or your kind help.

Would it just be good to simply move all the folders/files to the root and amend my vbseo .htaccess file?

Thanks

Hello Samuel ,

If you have ssh access to your server , you can move all your files from forum folder to root with the following command

Code:

mv -R /path/to/your/forums /path/to/root

If you donot have SSH access you can do it very easily with most FTP programs just selecting all files in your forum folder and move them to root folder.

don't forget to change your vboptions for the forum URL BEFORE you move, or you will have problems getting into it to change it after.