Move my forum to a new domain?

[Mike]

I am curious what everyone would think of this.

I see sites that have their forums on a different domain than their site.
I could move my forum from .com to .net and have it as the top level of the domain rather than at /forum.

Would that help me long term or would be be not worth messing with? With this particular site, I have a complete content site, my forum is just part of the grand scheme.

[BamaStangGuy]

This is a good question. I would think it would be a good idea "if" you did it from the beginning. However I don't know if it is a good idea to do it now.

[Lian]

I think it is a bit confusing from a users side to have domain.com for a site and domain.net for the forums e.g.

If it is good SEO wise - sorry, I can't say.

[Mike]

The situation with my site is strange. I get plenty of traffic everyday, but only a small portion of it enters via my forum.

My only concern would be the loss of pages via my forum possibly hurting my rankings for my main page.

[Juan Muriente]

How long have this site being up? How many SERPS you have for the current forum location? What's the PR for the forum's root page?

[Brandon Sheley]

i think it can be confusing to the members..
but.. i think the shorter your url is, the better..

without the/forums/

[Joe Ward]

The age of your domain is a contributing factor for SEO as well. It might be better to simply go with a sub-domain forum.mydomain.com or mydomainforum.com (to accompany www.mydomain.com).

[BamaStangGuy]

I am going to do this for a new site I am starting up