Putting forum on seperate domain

[Aleister]

I just bought a new hosting service yesterday, and I am moving all of my sites to their own domain (which is better for so many reasons I know - especially SEO).

My main site has a forum. I am trying to decide if I should move the forum to a domain all by itself.

If I did, not only will my main site link to it, but another site. So 2 domains will point to the forum domain, and the forum domain would probably point to both of them as well.

Are there any advantages/disadvantages to this? I do not want any search engines to think I am massivly cross-linking or anything.. any thoughts? Thanks!

[goodroi]

I do not want any search engines to think I am massivly cross-linking

That's funny, because isn't that the whole point of what you are doing? Moving the forum section to a stand alone domain is fine as long as all of the domains are on different c class ip addresses. The worst case is that the search engines will devalue your interlinking. This is not something you will be penalized for.

Another thing to think about before you move the forum section, is how many pages have been indexed by the search engines. If there are alot of pages already indexed you will need to worry about losing existing traffic, duplicate content, etc.

[jamie]

we did exactly this early this year, as our forum was generating too much traffic (is there such a thing ;-) for our server which otherwise serves mostly static pages.

although we are based in europe with our main sites hosted in the UK, we opted for a MUCH cheaper hosting option in the US for our forums - with almost unlimited bandwidth.

we have saved SO much money by setting up the forums on a separate, dedicated US server as opposed to upgrading our own server hardware, which in the UK can be very expensive.

obviously this is from a UK perspective, but might help ;-)

cheers

[Aleister]

Well I am not putting everything on separate domains just so I can do cross-site linking :) I just wanted all my little sites (that are in no way related) seperate, instead of having mainsite.com/subsite3 etc..

I think I will go ahead and keep the forum on the main site then, since there seems to not be a huge difference (unless I have the diff class c ips) which I do not.

This way the only real cross linking will be a little from the primary domain (with its forum), and a separate site (which has it's own section in the forum on the primary domain).

Speaking of cross linking, is it only a problem if you are linking to the other domains from every single page on every single domain?

As I mentioned the only sites that will be cross-linked will be those 2 sites. and not even that much. It is so the viewers will be aware of the sites, not so much search engine spiders :)

[dvduval]

Keep in mind that many big players definitely crosslink. You just don't want to involve too many sites. 4-5 sites should not be a problem as long as they all have sufficient content.

[Aleister]

It might be better to start a different post, but you all seem to have a pretty good grasp on this type of thing :)

Once I terminate my current hosting (mainsite.com), the mainsite.com/subsite's of course will not work anymore, since they have all been moved to their own domain.

I am still not sure whether to keep an index in each of the old directories, simply giving a link to the new location for each site, or if I should just use .htaccess to do a 301 redirect.

a 301 might be better for most search engines, and might even pass PR, but the main problem is, what about the people who have bookmarks? Or click on links from sites? They will think the link still works, and they will not get changed!

That is the main problem I have with 301s. They are nice but sometime the transparency can cause problems. Any recommendations?

[SkyDog]

I've heard that backlinks on the same block aren't that significant. Splitting into seperate domains might not be the big SEO advantage that you believe. I think you're better off keeping the forum on the main site.