General forum question

Hello all, I've been enjoying this forum in a lurking capacity for quite some time. I'm not sure if this is the right place for this question so apologies incase.

I'm about to launch a forum in conjunction with the site below. Currently i have it located within a subdirectory of the main domain. Is their any benefit in hosting a forum at a separate domain name from the main site? Of course i mean in terms of generating traffic and/or pagerank.

The site has only been live for 7 weeks or so i'm trying to think ahead alittle. Thanks in advance.

http://www.thefinishingschoolatl.com

Sorry I can't be of much help with this topic, I think you'll get a better targeted answer here in search engines though

I'm thinking a separate domain would be the safe approach in terms of ranking.

In terms of SEO it is a good idea. The home page always gets the highest ranking. And since post pages are closer to the home page, they rank better too. A good example is Ozzu. In terms of building a brand name it is a not so good idea. It may also confuse the users who would suddenly discover themselves in a seperate domain after clicking the forum link in your site.

I think it's a good idea and could help in the long run with PR .

Well people have said in terms of Pr its a good idea. Well I don't agree

If you have a PR 7 site link to your main domain your going to generally get a PR6 - thats how it works.

So simply point a PR7 domain to your forum at a sub category of your main domain and you'll get a PR6 for that page as well.

I think hosting it on a different domain would be bad idea. Look at the giants who have millions of pounds to spend on people to think for them. They all host thir forums on either a subcategory or a subdomain.... because it makes sense.

Learn from them.

I dont quite understand the question.

seperate domain as in sub domain or a totally different domain name?

- hosting on a subdomain makes more sense,as jess has pointed out. from that perspective.

- Hosting the forum in a different domain name may just work out as well, provided that the change is not confusing and the forum site is also very useful. Ultimately, the forum is linked to your main site and therefore passing PR to it.

Well, I assumed he was talking about a totally different domain.

In this case though subdomains are better. A practical problem with this solution is, it is hard to get two links from someone to the same website, no matter if it is in a subdomain. But whoever has the money or connection to get links from pr7 websites should not have to worry about such trivialities. He would do just as well with a forum in a subdirectory.

I'll throw my advice see if it makes sense to you.

If you have a low pr site having it as a sub-domain will help get it crawled faster, at least the top page(s). But if you have a pr4+ I don't think it really matters too much.

I think if your forum is very specific and directly relates to your site, better to have it as a directory. But if it's more generic you could go with the sub-domain (or 2 different domain names same thing).

Thanks for the input guys. I think i'll go with my gut feeling which is to host the forum within a directory of the main domain for now (mainly for the same reason Jess outlined in her post). The forum, of course, is of a specialist nature which in part will be a public forum and in part private( exclusively for students of the school... some of the materials and processes used are are trade marked).

As i said I'm looking ahead... the site went live 7 weeks ago, is now fully indexed by google so i shall just have to be patient as i await page rank and in the meantime establish some decent back links.

Thanks again.