Forum sub domain penalty

Is running forums in a subdomain bad?

[dealcatcher]

For the last couple years we have always run our forum in a subdomain ex. forums.example.com. Google has indexed over 110,000 pages of this subdomain and I think it now may be causing some sort of penalty. The sub domain has back links to our main site on tabs and a few other places. I realize Google treats the subdomain as a completely separate site.

After Dec. 15th we noticed a change, or Google traffic to our main site has dropped by about 80% and our forum Google traffic is actually up by about 30%. If the forums are causing this penalty my options are move the forums to www.example.com/forum/ or change all links to use some type of JavaScript that Google will not follow or index. Does anyone have any ideas or solutions, or should we wait until the Google changes settle down a bit?

[edited by: ciml at 5:16 pm (utc) on Dec. 28, 2004]
[edit reason] Examplified [/edit]

[treeline]

Sounds like Google likes you overall just fine, but increasingly loves your forums and just isn't as excited about your main site. If the forums had been part of the main site your overall traffic and pagerank might be up as well on the main site. Are your forums outcompeting your site?

[conor]

no

[walkman]

who knows. What we think as rules don't seem to be applied uniformly...unless we're missing something (very likely). I would move to /forums/ just to be sure and have one less thing to "worry" about.

[dealcatcher]

Here something strange that I've noticed. If I do a search I get results at the very top of Google for my forums. If I insert the filter=0 at the end of the search url I get back my main site, also at the top of the results.

Does this mean my forums are what is penalizing my main site?, or could it be there is some type of penalty on the main site so the forums are simply chosen instead?

I'm debating on moving the forums from the subdomain, but I don't want to do so if some other type of penalty is already inflicting the main domain.

Thanks again,
Dan

[claus]

>> Is running forums in a subdomain bad?

No. Why should that be bad? Can you give me any rational reasons supporting the idea that this should be bad? Does a 30% increase in Google traffic suggest that Google thinks it's bad?

A forum can be a bad forum or a good forum. A good forum equals quality content to the bots (and a lot of other stuff to humans) - still, a good forum is a good forum no matter which URL it is placed on.

>> moving the forums from the subdomain

I'd advice against this (or indeed moving anything from one domain to another) for the time being. A year ago i would have given the same advice in your specific case, at this moment in time that advice is sort of "one size fits all" although i reckon it will get back to normal eventually. (which, in your case, does not change the outcome, as you shouldn't move :-)

[dealcatcher]

Thanks Claus, I guess my concern with running it in a subdomain is the navigation links back the main site. The forum has lots of good content but Google also has 193,000 forum topics indexed each page with a few links back to the main site for navigation purposes.

Some of the forum topics are also discussions on items posted on the main site, so there may be a bit of duplicate content. It just seems odd that one day, Dec 15th out main site's traffic from Google goes down by 80% and on the same day the forum goes up 30%.

[claus]

>> but Google also has 193,000 forum topics indexed (...) with a few links back

That is a lot of linking. It is the same as running a pure text link ad on every page on another site. There's a large amount of threads on sitewide links [google.com] - some suggest that this could be a problem. (note the careful wording - i'm not sure that it's always a problem)

So, perhaps you should consider your linking structure - do your users really need a link from every page to your other site? If they really do, perhaps you could insert it with javascript (preferably in an external ".js" file) in stead of html?

I know Google can parse URLs from on-page javascript, but i'm not so sure about external JS files - anyway, even if they do it will count as one link and not 200K links.