Best installation strategy for adding forum to existing site?

Hello, I would like to ask what is the best installation strategy for adding a forum to an existing site. I have a site about woodworking I would like to add a forum too, I do not want to affect the current seo strategy for the woodworking site but I would like it to benefit from a forum and vice versa. Would it be best to install a forum say under a subdirectory /forums of current site or create a subdomain forums.mywoodworkingsite.com and install the forums there on the subdomain and just hyperlink to that from my current sites home page?

Thanx

 

What site? (cuz I like woodworking)

I think it should like match the rest of the place. If you have yoursite.com/articles and yoursite.com/tools/ or whatever, then I think that your best best would be yoursite.com/forum/ (SEO be damned) as your current readers (and new readers) will find it easier.

Personally I prefer site.com/forum...but honestly I am unsure of pros and cons of either for SEO.

 

I also like woodworking.

The SE will tend to treat the forum as a seperate entity if you install it in a subdomain. If popular, over time it may outrank the main site. If you do it in a directory, it might pass a little ranking to the main site. It might also lower the main site.

Based on what you said in your post, I think you want to do it as a subdomain and link to the main site from the forum.

Noticed you are a new member. Welcome to the forums.

 

Good advice above.

Depending on what software you are planning on using, installing in subdirectory could be easier than doing it on subdomain... But only a little.

Also, it's not a bad idea to at least have a redirect from subdomain to /forum - or which ever way you choose. Many just type what they reckon is the address - and that should be a 301 redirect (a permanent one).

 

Hey Ya'll...yea... I am from Texas ...
Anywayz more about me I am a veteran USAF, lived in Germany, England, Canada, Panama Canal ( that was the longest TOD)


I really appreciate your advice and I will be honest and upfront as most of us in Texas tend to be, but not all of us ;], I joined this forum to lurk, and pick your brains Been out of the digital loop for awhile, everything was running fine on autopilot....and then I had my main woodworking site slammed by Microsoft...I am an ex-Cisco/Microsoft/Novell engineer and I have a BS in CS, (is it me or does that BS sound ironic) who turned to rustic woodworking back in 97 or so...go figure? Guess I got tired of sitting in a cubicle watching firewall logs while my boss screwed all the new hires...

(excerpt from Google Support Post)
We basically are a rustic furniture making website and we
have/had an e-commerce site hosted with Microsoft Bcentral for over 8
years who shut down the service June 1st not just on us but 100,000 +
customers and they gave us no migration strategy or options. Other
then totally rebuild which we are frantically trying to do but the new
site just does not have the linkpop or indexing yet that the old site
had. What are our options? We had good link popularity, good traffic,
enough to keep the lights on and the cabin warm and the horses fed.
But this month the horses are eating better then we are Thank God
we have a good garden in...Also I can see the traffic still coming in
from the old links or indexing but alas it is all going to pages that
are pretty much useless and genning 404's. We had 484 images and 300 product pages indexed but since Bill shut the server off no images show and the sc buttons do not work and the links are dying fast.
_______________________________________________________


The above pretty much explains my situation...but fortunately we are pulling out of that...but it cost a little, but in the long run I think I made some good decisions...I looked at Microsoft's Migration FAQ which suggested Monster.Com, Website Pros, but it was all on a rental basis again, which alerted me to :NO MORE: So I then looked at hosting options at godaddy.com, and I found that just co-locating a LINUX ES3 server with 20 domains on three redundant tier 1's was cheaper. And then I needed a shopping cart backend, I looked at Miva, and some open source and chose to do an ISP bulk purchase of shopsite.pro for ten licenses 10K, it will auto-generate my sites in 4 formats or page/programming languages php,jsp,html,etc.. and runs on a not-blue server but LINUX ES3 HIVE server.

So bottom line is I want to add a blog and a forum about rustic woodworking because looking at my stats and logs there are alot of people out there in cyberspace searching for "How TO" make a log chair or "How TO" make a barnwood frame, the SC software I purchased has an affiliate marketing and digital downloads feature. I want to promote or use this idea, the bottom line is you will never keep people from stealing or copying your ideas, I think in my soul it is just better to spread the knowledge around to some extent?



and I stumbled across some cool sites in my research, but I do not want to risk vulnerablities. (I had a PHPADNEWS exploit that is 2 years old ran against one server this week, go figure? Script kiddies...)

This guyz site is cool...and I like his attitude I can see myself doing something like this in the future...but hiding the Bud bottles from the cam..

http://www.thewoodwhisperer.com/

and here are some others....pretty much most of them are running the forums and blogs from a sub-dir off their main site, a few like the big mag azine ones are using sub-domains...

A Woodworking Odyssey
About.com / Woodworking
Blanchard Creative Woodworking
Fine Woodworking Blog
Jerry Stover's Blog
Jim McPhail Fine Wood Craft
Lindsay Staniforth Blog
Matt's Basement Workshop Podcast
Musings from the Workbench
Philsville Blog
Popular Woodworking Blog
Power Tool Bench
Seafoam Woodturning
The Woodworkers Edge
Woodworking Dungeon
Woodworking Magazine Blog
Woodworking Online

So I guess the topic turns off-topic what in your MHO is the best software for a Blog or a Forum (Wordpress, ROR, etc.. (Vbulletin with vbseo?)????

Thanx Ya'll
FXCII

 

I tried to read all that. I really did.

If you control the domain and it is the same as it was. Get those 404 pages redirected to something. At a minimum get up a custom 404 page with links to every page of your new site. If you need an example of that remove the spaces and try this link my-e-space . com /wood.html

Frankly, for a WW site I would be inclined to use static html pages so that I never lost my content again. For articles a blog type script is best for posting articles. Wordpress is about as good as it gets though I can turn you on to a script that is easier to create a custom template for.

For communication with others a forum is best. You can have both on the same site.

Post away with any questions.