Dramatic change in search-engines?

My Homepage directly leads into the vb-forum. It's quite a large forum and so I ask myself, if I should make a real home, where just the links to the forum, wiki, chat and more resides.
I could place a description of our interests there and explain which different content we have and where it is found.

Question 1:
- Is it basically a good idea to do so (example: with vbadvanced)?

Question 2:
- Does this have an impact on search engines?
Until today the searchengines found the forum directly under the url-home. Could it be, that the forums gets "counted" less, if it is linked by a news site (and so it is accessed not within 1 step but in 2)?

Thanks a lot!

Marcel

A homepage can be beneficial; however, I see many people install vBAdvanced. Then they just start adding "who's online", "calenders", and (often) a stream of technical announcements.

None of these things are going to be helpful for SEO purposes. And it's certainly arguable as to whether they have any value to the user, or aesthetic value either.

If you are going to make a homepage, then make sure you keep it streamlined, and work really hard on optimizing the content, and leaving out anything that doesn't add direct value to your theme (i.e. niche content focus).