Move site out of a nested folder and not lose SEO?

[SJ77]

Hi

For 12 years my site has been in a nested directory.  www.mysite.com/forum

How can I move my site to the top level domain without losing 12 years of SEO?  (mysite.com)

Any help appreciated

Thank you 🙂

[SJ77]

Hi

I suspect the solution might be a rewrite script to take folks who land in "forum" up 1 level.

I should mention I have NGINX but I do not know how to write the rewrite script if anyone has experience and wants to share that would be awesome.

Thank you 🙂

[Adlago]

Look this article

https://www.nginx.com/blog/creating-nginx-rewrite-rules/

[marklcfc]

I did this a few years ago, and had no idea what to do with regards to that. Does it matter now or are there any changes worth making?

[opentype]

I wouldn’t experiment with this type of stuff, unless there is a very good reason to do it and you are experienced enough to deal with every possible problem along the way. 

[mcsg]

On 4/23/2019 at 4:43 PM, SJ77 said:

For 12 years my site has been in a nested directory.  www.mysite.com/forum

How can I move my site to the top level domain without losing 12 years of SEO?  (mysite.com)

@SJ77 Am I correct in understanding you will be moving IPS application to the root (eliminating the `forum` folder)? Or are you looking for only URLs to be rewritten?

In the case of moving the app from the folder, you would change your server block location root in nginx config and to make sure all your old URLs are permanently redirected to new, add something like this:

location ~* ^/forum/(.*) {
    return 301 /$1;
}

I should also note that I agree with opentype. 12 years of SEO is nothing to be experimenting with. In theory, 301s should not affect SEO, but your results may vary.