Hi, Hoping y'all can give me some insight on this. My forum has been around for 2 years as a subdomain to my main site. I'm about to hand over control of the forum to someone else who has more time than I do to manage it. He's fairly keen on making the forum a subdirectory of the main site, partly because that's how he's always done it. I think I understand the logic between using either a subdomain or a subdirectory, and that's why I initially chose to have it as a subdomain, since it is related to my main site, but distinct in its own way, kind of the way DigitalPoint set it up. From my reading around, it seems that sudomains and subdirectories are not treated as differently by the search engines(especially Google) as they were in the past. But even though it's not as big a deal, it can still have an impact. The recent Google algo. change got me thinking whether it might not be better to make is a subdirectory, since all the pages would end up adding depth, and in theory, some PR juice to the main site. On the other hand, I would lose 2 years worth of history/pagerank. Data points: The two sites are fairly well cross-linked to each other, with all the pages on both sites having a link to the homepage of the other. The main site is a PR7 and the forum has a PR6. The forum has had very little activity, but I expect that to change with someone else in charge. I also have an image gallery which is also not very active, has its own subdomain, and would need to move to a subdirectory if I switched the forum. Should I do the switch, now, before the forum gets active and bulked up? Leave it as is because the cross-linking is enough, not worry specifically about Google, since it's not the only search engine out there, Google might change its mind later on this? Any input/advice/opinion would be appreciated. Thanks
why not switch it... but if the forum got lots of members ( I mean a lot ) you might loose significant traffic on it, try to consider that one.
Right now, the forum has barely any activity and only a few active members. That's why, if I would do it, I would do this now rather than later, after the new guy jump-starts the forum. Just not sure if I should do it.