Forum location: move to root?

[SnitchSeeker]

I have quite a few questions. Sorry if they are not unique and have been answered before. Here goes...

A bit of background: I use vB for my entire site (not just forums) including News, Fanfics, an RPG, etc. and am not thrilled about the URL giving away the fact that they are located inside the forums (since the url is /forum/bla-bla.

1) I wonder if it is possible to customize the URL for certain forums. For example, if I want most of my forums to show a forum structure i.e. sitename.com/forums/forum-name/thread-name.html can a specified forum show up like this instead: sitename.com/forum-name/thread-name.html (in this case forum-name would be "news" or "fanfics" or "RPG" etc.) ??

2) Is it better for me to move my site from the folder to root if I want to do this (if I want to not make it obvious from the url that news is located in the forums)?

3) If I move my forums to root, will I lose Search Engines traffic? (or will vbseo help forward the old url's to the new, including a move from /forum/ folder to root?)

4) If I am to move forums to root, and am confident that I will not lose traffic (I get 2,000 - 3,000 visitors per day from Search Engines - mostly Google of course), should I do this before or after installing vbseo?

I think I have more questions but this will do for now.

Thanks!

[Joe Ward]

I wouldn't worry about forum in the URL. However, if you do want to do it, that's exactly the time when I would install vBSEO. Then all the 301 redirects can be in place at once without having the structure updated twice in the engines.

[SnitchSeeker]

So does that mean you recommend that I move the forum to root and immediately after install vbseo?

Or what are you suggesting?

And could I please have a proper answer to each of my questions?

Thanks!

[Joe Ward]

Actually I feel that it is ok to keep /forum/ in place. So, option 1, is to just install vBSEO and keep /forum/.

IF, however, you do intend to remove /forum/, then you should do that first, and then install vBSEO immediately afterward.

[SnitchSeeker]

Ok. Thanks Joe.

I still would appreciate a little light on my first question:

Can I specify different rewrite rules to specific forums? Or will they all be treated alike?

[SnitchSeeker]

IF, however, you do intend to remove /forum/, then you should do that first, and then install vBSEO immediately afterward.

But will the 301 redirects work for url's as they are right before the install of vbseo? Or for how url's were before I changed changed the location from folder to root?

(I didn't think of asking about this in my last post. Sorry for the double-post!)