Which would you choose and why?

If you had an electronics AV site (we will call the site ABC.com) that is a PR5 and has serious traffic... and you wanted to start a new forum related to AV, home theater and electronics, which URL would you choose to add the forum to for the best SEO opportunity and why?

1. ABC.com/forums

2. ABCforum.com

Now throw in another site and forum that is already a home theater type forum (we'll call it XYZ.com and XYZ.com/forums) with both the home page and /forums page being a PR4. This forum would be merged with ABC's forum and take on ABC's name. Is there anyway for ABC to take advantage of XYZ's PR4 pages.

Thanks!
Sonnie

why can't you use ABC.com?

i always perfer ABC.com over ABC.com/forums

ABC.com can't be used... it's already being used and does not need to be interrupted. The choices are 1 or 2.

why not build abc.com around with the forums.. just like vbseo.com has?...

anyway.. just seems lazy not to do that. i guess so with abc.com/forums. crap. but better then a new domain, since you can direct traffic to it quite easily.

Well... we can use ABC.com to help promote the forum, but changing it up to actually be the main forum index page will probably cause it to lose its PR5.

Here's another decision similar to the above that I am faced with...

I want to build an information site for something related to our forum... which is home theater. So our forum... and we'll just call it forum.com... is a PR4.

Would it be better to add a page to forum.com for the new info site... such as forum.com/info-site

OR

Get a new site, info-site.com and link to it from forum.com

Which would SEO quicker?

Thanks!

Some things for you to think about:

When you create a forum, you can be creating internal competition for the search phrases of your main website.

When you create a reviews or information etc part of the website, you are again adding competition with your own pages as to which page Google is going to rank for a particular search phrase.

Question: What are the search phrases/titles etc that will be used on the forum/other pages, and will they create internal competition???


If there is competition created, then you are better to have forum.domain.com.

This means that the subdomain is able to rank in its own right, and not be competition for your main website.

But if there are too many links between the two websites, the websites can get treated as one website, and be as if the forum was a subdirectory.

Therefore, have only say a max 5 live links between the two websites, and rel=nofollow the remainder of the links.

If you have a powerful main website, the subdomain takes on some of that power for itself. So its not as hard to get the subdomain ranked. You don't have the same sandbox issues, and you don't need as many independent links.

Links for the subdomain with therefore help the main domain, as much as links for the main domain will help the subdomain.

The forum is able to rank in its own right for phrases so you are able to get a number of results in the top ten for particular phrases.

Check out a Google search for "ebay" and you will see a number of their subdomains listed.

I have seen a number of powerful websites get "confused", when they have had so many different parts to their website - videos, reviews, shopping cart, forum, blog, ... and they all compete for the same search phrases, and maybe the best result being the shopping cart page, is not the top, and so its a real problem. For those sort of sites, and subdomains is the best bet.

So does that sound reasonable???

I think I'm following you.

I believe the new page would be some competition for the forum, yes. The reason being is we plan to optimize the new page with most of the same info in one of the forum titles/threads/posts.

I am wanting this new page to be a page that would possibly provide a better layout of the information than what the forum could do via threads and posts, which isn't always the optimal layout. This would maybe help us better rank for some of those terms that via the forum are not ranking well.

Is newpage.domain.com better than domain.com/newpage/