Domain url Forum or forums?

[stevectaylor]

when choosing a new forum domain name for a topic say cars, would you go for carsforum.com or carsforums.com?

'Cars' is irrelevant this debate is about the 'forum' bit.

[Shazz]

forums

[Mert Gökçeimam]

I personally try not to include forums inside my main domain.

[briansol]

^ ditto.

no 'talk', 'forum(s)', 'chat', 'community' or anything else in my urls either.


you don't go to googlesearchengine.com do you?

[stevectaylor]

Why not include them as if someone is looking for a forum ect?

[Johnny5]

I'm curious about the same. If you want to create a car forum and you can't get car.com, wouldn't carforum.com be ideal and be the defacto destination (all things other than domain name being equal) for people looking to discuss cars? On second thought, maybe discusscars.com? Still, though, you'd have discuss in there.

Without a feature unique enough to make the buzz of the site "viral", and without a huge budget for advertising, wouldn't having the domain name itself describe what the thing is give visitors a sense of authority "this is THE car forum", make people more likely to link to you using the language you want, and position your home page at the top of results for "car forum"? Although not many people search for <thing> forum, I would imagine more search for <thing> forum than JohhnysCarSite.com, etc...

I don't mean to challenge your guys' expertise by any means... you know much more about this than me. I would just like to hear more of your thoughts so that I can check myself before I end up wasting more money I don't have in the future!

Thanks!

[briansol]

look through the top 100 sites on alexa. 98% do not have a single word that describes what it is within its .com.

amazon has nothing to do with a river.
google has nothing to do with a huge number.
yahoo has nothing to do with an expression of happiness
etc etc...

It's all about branding. You want to brand your site as a 'thing' or a 'product'.


to take your reference, look at Jalopnik: Obsessed With The Cult Of Cars has nothing to do with 'cars' or 'blogs'.

[hornstar6969]

if you were to choose id go with both to ensure a competitor would not steal it when you become big.

ive always gone with forums myself. eg. domain.com/forums

[eJM]

I think it's always a good idea to use relevant keywords in your domain name. That doesn't mean, however, that you need to register a domain like <somekindacar>forum.com or discuss<somekindacar>.com. If you are going to have a forum then you should put it in its own subdirectory and then, walla, you got another automatic keyword without having it be a part of the domain name. I thought of that scheme when I registered TheFloorPro.com. My forum is located at TheFloorPro.com/community/. It also allowed me to develop other relevant subdirectories: TheFloorPro.com/articles/ TheFloorPro.com/reviews/ TheFloorPro.com/how-to/ etc.

My suggestion would be to avoid using a subdirectory name like "forum". You would be in competition with hundreds of thousands of forums and possibly hundreds of "forums" in your niche. If it's a car forum, I might consider <yourcardomain>.com/garage/ or <yourcardomain>.com/workshop/ - because that's where people go to get the solutions to their car problems.

Keywords are hard enough to capitalize on. Using them in subdirectories and domain names is a good strategy. If you have the time and the resources to use a domain name that has no current history or meaning to anyone but you, then go for it. But Google, Yahoo and Amazon all got their starts years ago, before the Internet was even 1/10th the size it is now and they had a relative fortune in investor dollars to help them make an imprint on everyone's mind.

R'gards,

Jim McClain