I am curious for your opinion.... I own a traffic exchange and in it I have incorporated a directory and a forum. I had both of them attached to the main site eg. mainsite/directory and mainsite/forum. Recently I changed the forum so that it is on it's own domain- and just pointed everything toward it from the site. My original idea was to have it all on the one site and this way have more content on the one domain - therefore bringing more traffic to the main site. Now I am thinking that it is easier to market and promote the forum now that it is on it's own domain. Do you think that I have made a mistake by moving the forum? Would it be a good idea to move the directory to it's own domain aswell - or is it better to leave it linked to the main site?
I was actually just asked about this earlier today from a client I suggest to him ( If it were my site, I would put them on the same domain. The reasoning behind this is its easier to carry over the links from your homepage. And the site gets indexed way faster then starting new sites.) Enjoy!
Thanks One of the main reasons I have chosen to do it this way is that I intend to launch another site of the same genre later this year and was intending the forum to be a kind of central forum for both sites. Since the directory is already a PR3 I am hesitant to mess around too much, but it is still quite new, so deciding what to do would be best to do it now - rather than in a years time.
I can see and understand your delema oddly enough. If you want to use the forum for both sites, then separating it would probably be your best option.
By all means make a new directory, but why would you move the old one? It's doing fine and cannot hurt your site. Just make a new one if you want more of this kind. I did and now I have 20-25 directories all doing great. They are not Yahoo directories yet but I'm moving ahead with One to two hundred visitors a day on each and every one of my directories. /miko67
Keep everything revolving around one site on ONE SITE. That includes blogs, forums, midgets, pages, images, etc. Wait... No, that list is good Cheers,
In my opinion (note that I am not necessarily coming from a business standpoint, but from a consumer standpoint on this), it is best to have everything under one brand name and domain name. This creates less customer confusion, and creates a stronger brand overall.
If this is being done from the begining, then i would certainly select to open them in seperate but related (having at least one common keyword in the domain name) domains.
Like the good folks here say - BAD idea! Google would have taught most of us to never ever play with duplicate content... A replicated dir-database is very much considered duplicated content. As for the ethics... give me a break As if any of you webmasters would be annoyed to see that one link, you so desperately submitted to one little directory, replicated on different ip-classes without moving a finger. Just because the copy-directory would - to an extend - be considered duplicate contend, doesn't mean that your new-and-free extra links would all of a sudden somehow smell and result in penalizing your precious sites by Google. I don't believe that! There, I had my rage /miko67
I would just leave it on the same domain simply because you can get the rank up much faster and all the people who know you will trust it if its on your site.
i keep most of the stuff on the same domain - simply because that helps your alexa ranking as well. thats why yahoo beats google in alexa - its all on one domain...
Um, Alexa ranking don't mean anything dude. But anyways the only reason I would do it is to fastly carry the link importance over to it.
I'm about to set up my own directory and this thread was very useful. I think I will do a test and set up a directory on my main domain and then one by itself and see which one does better One question though. Is it better to have it in just a directory or as a subdomain?
Maybe you can let us know My main dilemma is that having on a seperate domain will not contribute to the traffic from the main site. I originally made the directory to draw more people to my main site.
You can do this if you wish, but I can answer the question for you. If your looking to up the PR or get traffic through the directory then putting it on your current domain is the way to go. If your just doing it as a fun project and don't care how long it takes, putting it on its own is going to work just fine. If you link to it and get it indexed.