I have been thinking about some changes to be done for my forum and blog for quite sometime but i'm not too sure if its a good idea or not. When i started my last forum i placed it under root so the forum sits at hxxp://domain.com and the blog at hxxp://blog.domain.com What i have in mind is to move the blog to the root and put the forum under a new subdomain like hxxp://forums.domain.com or hxxp://domain.com/forums/ Which format do you think is better? the domain has a pr2 ranking and has about 10k pages indexed in google. i would like to know your thoughts.
Use the domain, so the blog is in the root www.domain.com, and the forum www.domain.com/forum this way your double the chance and share love under the same domain. subdomain will need optimization for it's own.
Use sitemaps to track times, and use .htaccess seo redirects to redirect sub domain to the forum and that will transfer all of your old seo data to the new location.
Actually subdomains are no longer treated as separate sites by the search engines. Such is life when people abuse a good thing for personal gain.
You have to take into account the internal linking structure of your forum. What are getting better search engine results right now? The blog or the forum? If you see more people coming in through the blog I would make that root, if most people come through the forum I would keep the forum root. Anways I think you'll get what I'm trying to say.
i get about 150-200 uVs/day for the forum and around 100 uVs for the blog. The blog has been started lately so its picking up.