SEO impact of adding a forum module to a site

[kariel]

I help maintain a site and the owners want to start a forum for their club members. This is a site that runs on Joomla, so it's likely we'll use some form of a Joomla module to add the forum functionality.

My main question is whether there is anything to be concerned about for SEO purposes when adding the forum. I've never set one up, so I don't know the best practices for forums/discussion boards (although I'm scouring the web for general info).

• Should it be a subdomain or on the main domain -- or does this not matter?
• Are there any general setup processes that I should pay attention to for SEO best-practices?

This question was mainly about the SEO impact, but if anyone can point me in the direction of forum best practice info as well, It would be appreciated.

Cheers!
Kristy

[kariel]

Thanks Maurizio,

I'm wondering the same thing that John asked -- what would make me decide to do it one way or another. I was just having a conversation with a coworker, and we were thinking maybe for our purpose we'd go www.forum.yourdomain.com -- for this reason:

The forum will be about 1 type of racecar, whereas the company is a racetrack that sponsors many types of racing, as well as being a sales point for this one racecar. In this case, I believe the company owner is trying to engage people for that specific vehicle.

The unanswered piece of this for me is whether there is an SEO implication one way or another. From what I understand, forums usually use nofollow on links, which means the forums.yourdomain.com doesn't really help the core company site -- other than potentially sending people there via topical interest and mentions by members (so it's a marketing play). To your point, if the forum is www.yourdomain.com/forum, then the content actually belongs to your site -- so ....... hmmmm. I'm still torn. Hopefully I'll get more input.

Thanks for feedback. It's helpful to hear what others are doing.

Cheers!

Kristy

[JohnPeters]

I have read a number of times tha it would be better for SEO to have forum.yourdomain.com

Can you tell us why you think it is better to have www.yourdomain.com/forum as I am also about to launch a forum

Thanks Maurizo

[malecce]

For the site is only good to have more content and i think is better to have:

www.yourdomain.com/forum
than
www.forum.yourdomain.com

There many forum module for joomla there are any with separated database and other that use the same database of joomla

Ciao

Maurizio