At first I made mysite.com/forum and forum.mysite.com AND www.forum.mysite.com ALL lead to the same forum.. I now believe this is not a good practace. Luckily, my website is in the early days, and thus I can change it now to do what's best and fix this problem before it becomes a real issue. My site has many different "areas." Regarding SEO and general good website design, am I best to make the link to the site's "areas" for example: forums.mysite.com and NOT mysite.com/forums Which is the best method? Also, I'm not sure how to shut off mysite.com/forums .. when someone types that it seems to bring up that directory automatically. Thanks for any help!
Well, the PageRank will flow to the subfolder (/forums) and the forums. is a treated as a separate site. You hear SEO veterans raving about sub folders, but when you really thing people will benefit from separating it, a sub directory isn't all bad. SEO chat, DP, SEO.com all use a sub directory for forums. HighRankings is employing a subfolder "/forums" so the PR built up with the forums will help out their primary domain too. The choice is yours, either way can have benefits when you are talking about forums. You are correct about the two entry points. You can easily redirect a non-www version of the site into the www version (or vice versa) with the .htaccess file.