I have a very popular forum that has been installed in my root directory. I am adding a wordpress blog to it, which i hope to make it my homepage instead of the forum. It was suggested that i change the forum index.php to index2.php and i can then use the wordpress index.php. however, i'm wondering what's the impact of doing this with regards to SEO? on google, mysite.com will now be pointing to my wordpress page instead of my forum page. will that make me lose alot of listing and ranking? any better way to do this? appreciate some advice, tks!
It will affect you ranking for a while as the pages will change and index2.php will be new. There's no way of getting round that but your ranking should return after a while.
Would definitely affect your rankings, good sir. If I were you, I'll keep my old homepage, install the WP bog on a folder (forum . com / blog /), link to it from homepage, and drive it home by adding Recent Posts feed on homepage as well.