Subdomains

Question #1
We have a site that has the forums in a subdomain. It ends up both the sub domain and sub directory are open. So forums.siteurl.com shows the same results as siteurl.com/forums/.

Luckily Google doesn'thave the /forums/ directory indexed at all but I am worried that duplicate content will be an issue in the future. Should I just create a 301 redirect from siteurl.com/forums/ to forums.siteurl.com and put it in the site root or what is the best way to handle this?

Question #2I'm also wondering how wise it is to use subdomains vs subdirectories. I started setting the site up in webmaster tools and Google seems to really treat the subdomain as a totally different site. Does this mean that back links wont be as valuable to the whole site vs to each specific area? Are there any other issues that should make me think about moving this subdomain to a subdirectory instead?

Just some background info. I'm just about to install VBSEO on this site but haven't done so yet. Google has about 90K posts indexed for the subdomain and the site has about 1.5mm posts.

Thanks.

In the forum root, you should have something like

Code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^forum\.domain\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://forum.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

in place of the standard 'www' redirect. This will keep everything on the forum subdomain.



Subdomains ARE as you suggest handeled as totally different sites. Same as site.com/~owner style urls with tilde's in them.

In my opinion, unless your forum is something completely different from the root.com subject matter, it should be in root it self or in a folder there in. (ie, acme... root is the products... /forum is the support forum area)

Look at google. all their search is in root.
mail is in mail.google.com as its a seperate app from from search. and so on.

Further, if you're going to use vb4 and the cms, having it on a subdomain makes it nearly impossible to have a solid all in one system, especially as the homepage. It's designed to be run in root.