Newbie question: benefits of having a forum (in terms of search engine ranking)

Hi,

I have private forums under my main website. The forums are "paid only" - so there's no free readers or writers.

The question: how much could OPEN & FREE forums help the main site ranking better in search engines? like... if it's www.mainsite.com and forums.mainsite.com - would it help getting relevant posts to "forums.mainsite.com" to also help "www.mainsite.com"? Or... is the main site and subdomain dealt completely differently, and the main site would not (directly) benefit from the subdomain?

(Indirectly of course the main site can benefit as people could find the subdomain and then simply visit also the main site - but I'm more interested in the search engine thing)

Thanks in advance

 

A paid only forum is not likely to help your site rank at all, in my opinion - because the content doesn't get indexed in the serps and people can't link to it. In general though a subdomain does help in the serps because if it ranks it will push down your competitors.

 

Oh, I should have been clearer. I meant what if I'd make it OPEN & FREE. (edited the post now)

Okay - so this answers my question... so if the forums would be free & open to people, it would help the... mainsite?

 

Search 'katinka hesselink' (me) in google and see how the subdomains get treated: I got four listings in the top-ten from my own site, the main site twice and two subdomains. People can fill up a great deal of real-estate in the serps using subdomains, because google treats them like separate sites. The only thing here is that it works only if you can get both to rank for significant search terms. I mean, it's not like many people actually search for my name , but those that do will certainly find mostly my own site. For keywords with actual competition it's obviously going to be harder to get the subdomains to rank. Certainly worth a shot though, and payed forums really aren't usually going to work anyhow.

 

A lot, you are not allowing any of the forum pages to be indexed by search engines, an active forum has "bots" on it everyday indexing the new content, my board has something like 250,000 pages indexed in Google.

 

I see... thanks people. Perhaps then I need to re-think my "Insiders" area, and open some parts to public.

Edit: oh, and sorry mods for putting this in the wrong category... I'll open my eyes next time Thanks for moving this.