Need Advice on Site Index

First, many thanks to the vBulletin Team in helping me to get VBSeo to working on my server!

Now I need a little advice on something.

I have my forum installed at mydomain/forums/. Prior to installing VBSeo I had in my domain root .htaccess file the following directive:

DirectoryIndex /forums/index.php

What this did was when someone came to my site at mydomain.com they would immediately see my forum without seeing the URL of mydomain.com/forums in their browser location bar.

I think it looked a lot cleaner and I think my search engine ranking may have been helped also because my Google PR is 5 for my domain root, and 4 for mydomain.com/forums

So I would like to keep the DirectoryIndex directive as is. Only problem is with VBSeo the forum URL's are not rewritten when I do it this way. They ARE rewritten properly when my site is accessed at mydomain.com/forums, just not at mydomain.com. So in effect, VBulletin is showing 2 different URL's to access my forums, one being the old vBulletin URL's accessed at mydomain.com, the other being the VBSeo rewritten URL's when accessed at mydomain.com/forums.

I know I could put a redirect to /forums but wouldn't this take away from the PR my root domain has?

Any ideas on how others may have addressed this would be appreciated.

I think that obviously the simpliest solution for you would to just move your vBulletin files and information into the root directory and not into an alternate subdirectory. Seems like you are applying this DirectoryIndex to work as a workaround for not having vBulletin in the root?

Originally Posted by Michael

I think that obviously the simpliest solution for you would to just move your vBulletin files and information into the root directory and not into an alternate subdirectory. Seems like you are applying this DirectoryIndex to work as a workaround for not having vBulletin in the root?

Michael,

Thank you for your reply.

Yes I was using DirectoryIndex as a workaround for not having VBulletin in the root. Because the PR was higher for my root than /forums

I do wish I had installed Vbulletin in the root now, but wouldn't moving it cause problems? Wouldn't lots of paths be wrong?

If you know an easy to more it from /forums to my root I would appreciate it.

Originally Posted by treasureman

Michael,

Thank you for your reply.

Yes I was using DirectoryIndex as a workaround for not having VBulletin in the root. Because the PR was higher for my root than /forums

I do wish I had installed Vbulletin in the root now, but wouldn't moving it cause problems? Wouldn't lots of paths be wrong?

If you know an easy to more it from /forums to my root I would appreciate it.

I myself moved my forums from the root directory into their own ./forums/ directory for organisation reasons, and actually it isnt that difficult to setup a couple of rewrite rules within your root .htaccess file to just strip the ./forums/ part of the URL for your vBulletin URLs. For example here is a snippet of the code i use to append ./forums/ to all my old root vBulletin URLs;

RewriteRule ^([^/]+/t-[0-9]+\.html)$ forums/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^([^/]+/f-[0-9]+\.html)$ forums/$1 [L,R=301]

RewriteRule ^(.+)/(.+)-([0-9]+)\.html$ $1/vbulletin-$2-t$3.html
RewriteRule ^([^/]+/[^/]+-t[0-9]+\.html)$ forums/$1 [L,R=301]