forum.site.name or www.sitename.com/forum best?

[Xao]

We have recently started up a forum a couple of months ago, it is slowly taking off. We just upgraded to vBulletin and just purchased vbSEO, now is the time to make a change if we are going to.

We have a store selling goods located on our domain at: domain.com - Get online with a domain name and web hosting and our forums have been running at domain.com - Get online with a domain name and web hosting, I'm curious if it wouldn't be better to change it to forum.domain.com for our forums for indexing reasons?

We are going to be linking keywords that our typed on our forum to link back to the actual items in the store. So I was thinking having a different sub-domain (ie: forum.domain.com) linking back to our main domain (domain.com - Get online with a domain name and web hosting) would be better than (domain.com - Get online with a domain name and web hosting -> domain.com - Get online with a domain name and web hosting).

Any opinions? I would use 301 Redirects to change the current indexes. Like I said, we just started so it's no big to take a hit, I just want to get it right before turning on vbSEO and starting to really push our forums.

TIA!

[Brandon Sheley]

If you are using sub domains, google will see each one as a different url. If you use a sub forum, google will assume site.com and site.com/forum are related sites.

cheers

[Xao]

My end goal is to raise the ranking of my store by linking to products from my forum.

So from that statement and your explanation below, it would be better to have forum.domain.com so the links from there to the store would help increase the relevancy of ranking against certain search terms, correct?

If you are using sub domains, google will see each one as a different url. If you use a sub forum, google will assume site.com and site.com/forum are related sites.

cheers