Where best to put 'community' portion of my site for SEO?

blahblahsite.com/community or my.blahblahsite.com?

[sr123]

Hi,

I have been working on some social-networking tools for my website. It's an established site that is doing relatively well in the SERPs. What I'd like to do is place the social network part of the site in an area that will be best from an SEO perspective.

I'm considering the following:

blahblahsite.com/community
blahblahsite.com/social
blahblahsite.com/socialnetwork
blahblahsite.com/<subject>socialnetwork --> replacing <subject> with a couple of keywords relevant to the site's subject matter.

The above are all subdirectories of the documentroot.

The following are ones I am considering that would require me to create a subdomain:

my.blahblahsite.com --> The 'my' is pretty common, like my.yahoo.com, etc. but it doesn't utilize keywords
community.blahblahsite.com
social.blahblahsite.com
socialnetwork.blahblahsite.com
<subject>socialnetwork.blahblahsite.com --> replacing <subject> with a couple of keywords relevant to the subject matter of the site.

I like the idea of a subdomain, but I'm worried that the search engines may look at that as a different site from my main site. I also like the idea of including keywords in either the subdomain name, or in the subdirectory name, because from my experience having the keywords in the URL often helps with rankings for those keywords.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Sam

[maximillianos]

Interestingly I am working on a similar project for my site right now. I choose the subdomain route due to the fact that my new community consists of mostly completely different content than my main site.

So instead of watering down my main site's theme, I opted to build a new site for it and use a subdomain.

Google will evaluate a subdomain as a different site, with weak ties back to the main domain.

I think this is the best way to leave your current site alone and build something new but integrated.

Hope this helps!

[rogerd]

I've done it both ways, and this is really part of the perennial greater discussion of using a subdomain or a folder for a major new initiative on a site.

A subdomain may make setting up separate hosting easier, which could be a concern if the forum gets busy. Sharing authentication might be slightly easier in a folder on the same domain. there are workarounds for all of these, of course.

[maximillianos]

It is definitely debatable both ways. Authentication issues for me (using a subdomain) involved simply changing a few lines of my javascript to make my site cookies work universally across subdomains.

From my perspective, it boils down to whether you want the content on this new section of your site to be associated with your existing content. If it will mostly be offtopic conversations, perhaps the subdomain route makes sense to keep some separation from the two worlds. If the forum is going to be mostly discussing topics in line with your main site, a subfolder may make more sense so you build up your content authority.