I recently purchased a medium sized active forum. It is running MyBB, and everything is located on the root domain. (www.domain.com). I want to install wordpress on the root of the domain, and relocate the MyBB installation to www.domain.com/forum. How can I do this with MyBB? I know the software has a feature where you can tell the script where it is, but does it move all the files? Will this have a bad effect on search engine traffic? The forum has close to 6000 posts, and I would like all search engine traffic to end up in the right place. Is there a way I could redirect the traffic to the correct place using .htaccess? I'm moving to a different shared host soon, just to let everyone know..so I would like to do the directory change when I switch hosts. Thanks in advance! +rep for anyone who helps
Yes, of course it will have an effect on search engines. It's not like you are moving one or two pages, but a whole forum, quite possibly consisting of 100s if not 1,000s of pages. There's an additional possible problem. By installing wordpress in the root and enabling the permalinks, which you would be silly not to, then word press will think any folder beneath it is part of the url of wordpress. In other words, anyone going to the /forum section will see a wordpress page See this post One thing you might want to try, that worked for me once upon a time. Install wordpress in it's own folder on the same level as /forum, then in the root create a blank index.php file and using a php include syntax, call in the wordpress page, so it shows up on the front page. for MyBB, I have never used it but I'm sure it's as simple as moving all the files to the forum folder and editing the config file to recognize the new url and folder structure
Thank you for your input! It's not actually wordpress that I will be using, it is a similar script that does not have permalinks. I was thinking that somehow using .htaccess I could have some files like /index.php and /status.php be allowed, while everything else i.e. /Forum-post-here.php is redirect to /forum/forum-post-here.php. Think thats doable?
It can be done with .htaccess and a rewrite rules. But if you want it to work 100% fine you'll have to do a bunch of rules and some of them may not be that easy. The impact on google will be the same, but at least surfers won't get a 404 Not Found error when they click on the search results.
When you move a script, you need to physically move all the files yourself and often update a config file to contain the new location. You can then easily add in a redirect that sends all requests to a particular directory to the new one. You start running into problems when you add another script into the old directory. How does it know whether or not requests should be redirected? You could check if the file exists in the new directory, then only redirect there if it does - but what if there's two files with the same name (eg index.php)? If either script uses URL rewriting (i.e. generates URLs that don't actually correspond to a real file but get rewritten using .htaccess), it'll be even harder to sort out. In theory, the effect on search engines should be minimal - if you can setup all existing links to 301 redirect to their new location, there shouldn't be a problem. Also before you go ahead, make sure you setup a useful 404 error page. If someone does follow a broken link, you want to tell them you've moved the forum, give them links to the new location and your new blog, etc. and users will be much more forgiving. You could consider logging 404 errors (or checking the apache log), and if certain pages are repeatedly being asked for, manually setup a redirect for that specific page.
Thanks for the help everyone. I think this is what I am going to do: I'm in the process of switching servers right now, so what I am going to do is move the script to my new server, tell it that its in /forum. I will then write a nice helpful 404 page saying that we moved the forums to a different directory, and then offer them a few different links to different areas of the site. The forum is using some SEO mod..I might get rid of that or edit the settings on it while I'm at it. Thanks for the help everyone!