Restructuring Site

Hello everyone,

I'm not sure if this is the best place to post this topic, however, I need some advice.

Currently, my forums sit in a URL structure like this:

www.mysite.com

However, I would like to move it to the following:

www.mysite.com/community

Has anyone done this before? Is there anything I should keep in mind? Anything special I should do?

I appreciate any advice.

You could have this in your roots .htaccess:

Code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mysite.com/community/$1 [L,R=301]

Keep in mind, that you must keep the same URL structure though.

Yes, I figured I would have to keep the url structure, which is fine with me. This move is still many months away, but I wanted to get some idea of what I I can look forward to when I do this.

Thanks for the suggestion, I would definitely want a 301 redirect going on.

If anyone else has any additional suggestions, even to do with regular vBulletin settings, I'm all ears.

Thanks again!

Quick question...

I still want users to be able to browse to www.mysite.com. I will be putting different content there. So I'm assuming the above .htaccess would redirect all traffic to the new forums location...is this true?

Yes, that is what the rule does that I gave you.

With vbseo, you don't have to 'move' anything

I outline this process here:
forum files from /<forum-threads> to /forums/<forum-threads>

Thanks for the reply, Brian. However I'm not yet sure if that's the route I want to take, but it may be my best option in terms of SEO.

Maybe it would be best if I explained my reasoning for doing so and then someone might be able to suggest an alternative solution.

Currently, I run a technical community covering various topics such as ASP, ASP.Net, php, MySQL, etc etc etc...

However, I want to move to a more website-ish look and have sections such as About Us and Products. I'm a software developer and plan on releasing my software through my site.

So, does anyone know of any alternative solutions? Should I still bite the bullet and change my directory structure? Should I follow Brian's suggestion?

We're still a fairly new forum, opened up in March '08. I actually have a ranking of 3 (lol) but my links often show up in the top 10 of search results.

Thanks for the helpful feedback.

I'm currently using my suggestion on a new site i'm building... Welcome to the Connecticut Forums

everything is in root. My home page (well, whats up on it) is just a custom vb template that I will be coding.
I even hacked vb links to run in root last night. folders just make it harder and more complicated for no good reason, and makes working with vbseo even harder. But, fact is it's the best solution for SEO out there. vba links even comes with built in re-write, and i chose to hack it and use vbseo on it instead.

You can have the 'website' look very easily if you're comfortable with basic css/html.