Should forum be on the same domain?

Does it make a difference?

[vik_c]

I have .com/.net/.org for this. The main site is on .com. I'm thinking of having the forum on .net or .org which have been just registered and laying unused for years. Will it make any difference in the Google ranking? Everything else being equal, will they be nicer to a forum on the same domain as the website as compared to a different domain which was so far unused? Does it matter to users? Can one integrate vbulletin across applications on two different domains? Any experiences?

[MThiessen]

not sure I would do that. I personally would 301 redirect everything to the .com and make a subdirectory for it /forums

Dividing it up will appear like two different sites in the search engines, this might not be a good thing, might actually cause duplicate content issues.

[vik_c]

I'm not moving a forum. I'm starting a new one. The original site will run Drupal and from what I've read so far, vbulletin seems a good choice for the forum. Yes, it may appear like two sites though I can probably have a similar color scheme/theme. The original content stays on the .com while the forum will have new content being created on an ongoing basis, on .net. How will the duplicate content penalty apply here?

[rogerd]

Is there a reason you feel a need to separate the two areas with different domains? This will confuse type-in traffic, may make login sharing more challenging to program, and will dilute your inbound links.

[vik_c]

Is there a reason you feel a need to separate the two areas with different domains?

I'm about to migrate the site to Drupal which seems a rather demanding application in itself. If there is a need to change hosts due to either the CMS or the Forum software, I could then deal with moving one site instead of two. What do you think?

[rogerd]

There are different ways of looking at this, but I'd tend to put the systems on the same server(s) - that way, you don't have to have redundant capacity for surges on one site or the other.

I'd probably opt for a subdomain vs. a separate domain if you want to keep them separated by domain. That would be a bit less confusing, at least to me.

[jtara]

A seperate host in your existing domain (not really a "subdomain", though the term is widely mis-used in this way...) would give you the flexibility to move to a seperate physical server in the future should that become necessary.

Main site: www.example.com or example.com
Forum: forum.example.com

[vik_c]

Thanks everyone.

[walkman]

I would do it on the same domain and as /forums, so the main domains gets any backlinks intended for the forums. I am planing a large *country*online.com site, and everything will be in folders so they all help each other with backlinks