Hello,

My bbpress install seems to be unintentionally hurting my Google health a bit by having a different domain from the rest of my site, which it links back to a couple of times on every page due to its navigation. My site’s canonical domain is http://www.domain.com and I think that bbpress was installed at http://www.domain.com/forum (it was a while ago and I wouldn’t swear to this), but when I take a look with Webmaster Tools, Google picks it up as living at domain.com/forum and counts any links to other parts of my site from a bbpress forum page (such as navigation or an answer to a support question that recommends reading a particular page on the rest of the site) as being one of many heavily-repeated links from an outside site.

I have gone to the bbpress admin settings page and set the field “bbPress address (URL)” to the fully-qualified URL.

At this point I would like any requests for domain.com/forum/* to be 301-redirected to http://www.domain.com/forum/*. I have a working 301 redirect at the root level of my site that successfully does this to all other pages on the site, but it doesn’t get applied to the forum directory, presumably because it has its own htaccess with bbpress-specific settings. I tried adding the following to the bbpress htaccess:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

But this just causes requests for the forums to be redirected to the root page of my site.

I have checked into the bbpress config.php and there doesn’t seem to be anything in there which controls this.

Can someone help me out getting everything working/perceived by Google as being at the same domain and subdomain so my forum navigation that goes to the non-forum part of my site isn’t counted as vast numbers of repeated links from a different site?

Thank you very much.

[@hlwinkler Participant 13 years, 7 months ago]

OK, I have gotten the redirection working by adding the following to the start of the htaccess for the forums directory before the bbpress business:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /forums/

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/forums/$1 [R=301,L]

</IfModule>

Do you think there is anything else I’ll need to do in order to get my forums and my main site picked up by Google as being the same domain? Thanks.

[@hlwinkler Participant 13 years, 7 months ago]

OK, I have gotten the redirection working by adding the following to the start of the htaccess for the forums directory before the bbpress business:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /forums/

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/forums/$1 [R=301,L]

</IfModule>

Do you think there is anything else I’ll need to do in order to get my forums and my main site picked up by Google as being the same domain? Thanks.