Hi, I have a blog which index fast and rank well and I only started this month. I have another site which I started last year rank well as well. I don't have much content on that site. However, I have a forum under that site, I have it like www.abc.com/forum which I updated daily with much more content than both the blog and the site itself. However, it rarely receives any traffic from google to the forum. I don't have a sitemap for the forum since I have to do it manually. I have a sitemap for the blog and site. So I'm wondering 1. if I should create a subdomain so that the forum looks like forum.abc.com rather than www.abc.com/forum 2. manually create a sitemap for the forum and update it regularly. Would the above 2 methods help in ranking? Any suggestions?
No point in remapping it to a subdomain, if anything I prefer leaving it in a directory structure. I would look for a free server side plugin that will automatically create the sitemaps for you, I have my sites set to recreate sitemaps every day using Joomla plugins.
1. Keep the structure as it is: there is virtually no difference between a subdomain and a directory structure. 2. Do not manually create a sitemap: find a plugin that will automatically do it.
Thanks for the advices. I couldn't find an automatic generator for my forum as it is not a popular one since my whole website is developed using c#/asp.net, and I had to find a forum that uses the same programming language, so I used yetanotherforum. I have the auto sitemap generator for my wordpress blog. Also, I use url rewrite which did something like http://www.abc.com/forum/yaf_postst1142_Online-Marketing.aspx, would it make any difference if I change it to the following which have the more important keyword in front. http://www.abc.com/forum/Online-Marketing-yaf-postst1142.aspx
I agree with Destiny... I recently spent some time researching information about Subdomains and SubDirectories for forums. If you have any further questions or concerns, feel free to post them.
also, am I suppose to have 2 site map? one for the main site, and another one for the /forum directory? Or I should put everything under the main site?
Consider adding an RSS feed to the forum that may help it get spidered and perform better in the search engines.
two sitemap is work well with google , for me i have main site (wp) and classifieds directory (another wp with different theme), so i created two sitemap and submit to google .... cause my classifieds sub had more post
Thanks, I will submit 2 sitemaps then. My forum already has an rss feed, but it doesn't seem like anyone subscribe to it.