Do knowledge base plugins on a subdomain have seo benefit?

[qdigi]

Hi SEO Moz,

We want to use a knowledge base plugin (cheaper & faster than building it ourselves) where we can have Q&As for our website. We want this to help with our SEO by adding in our keyterms that we want to rank for.

We've looked into TenderApp & Get Satisfaction which look like good solutions - however, as they're both on a sub-domain do we get any seo benefit from this? When people link to our knowledge base, will this help our website at all - or is the benefit going to go to TenderApp/Get Satisfaction?

For instance -

Our website URL is http://widget.products.com

The KB URL is http://widgetsupport.products.com

If the above plugin is not a good solution, is there anything else that is better?

Any help will be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey

These are essentially forums for you to engage with your customers and not a million miles away from this here Q&A system.

If you are using these to answer common customer questions, build a knowledge base and benefit from user generated content then it would certainly be better to have this on the main domain as a subdirectory than to have it on the sub domain.

Sure, you could have links from the sub domain back to the main site but really, these are two separate entities and in every discussion where people have asked the subdomain vs directory question I have never seen anyone say subdomain.

You want one site with one set of inbound links and one nice healthy link profile if at all possible.

This is a good read:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

Also, loads of other articles on SEOMoz answering this question to give you some further reading:
https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8&ion=1#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=subdomain+or+subdirectory+site:seomoz.org&oq=subdomain+or+subdirectory+site:seomoz.org&gs_l=serp.3...4939.10518.0.10589.34.25.7.0.0.1.253.1620.23j1j1.25.0...1.0...1c.AWvjSgMGrPI&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=6dd2acfce60f574c&biw=1366&bih=643&ion=1

What are you using for your main site? A CMS? There maybe an easy solution without having to go this subdomain route. Let me know what you are using and I will try and offer some suggestions as I am sure the rest of the happy shiny seomoz people will as well.

Hope this helps.
Marcus

[qdigi]

Hi Marcus,

Thanks for that! We use WordPress as the CMS for our site. With something like TenderApp - we want to use it for Q&A but mainly, to have a very large and solid FAQ and Glossary on there (generated by us - and using keywords we want to rank for). I really like the SEO Moz one but I believe it's built in PHP? We don't have the resources or time at the minute to build our own service so we would like to use a plugin, but one that is hosted on our domain. Does something like this exist?

Also, I have another problem. Our website has another subdomain - our main site sells certain paid-for products, but we also offer a self-service solution that is free that is branded differently (though we do associate it with our brand name). Currently, this self-service solution is hosted on a subdomain to our main site - but is not doing very well in ranking for our keywords. What would you recommend we do? Our keywords are not in the domain name unfortunately.

Thanks for your help!

[Marcus_Miller]

Right, the first issue, there are loads of options. I would personally look at something like this: 
http://www.woothemes.com/2011/07/supportpress/

This is a WordPress theme that expands on the core functionality and creates a support environment. This is a full theme so you would likely need another wordpress installation in a sub directory but it will give you a rich support environment and all on the same URL.

Alternatively, if you don't want to manage another install, you could use a WordPress forum plugin, BBPress will do the job but there are a list of options here: 
http://chasesagum.com/5-best-choices-for-wordpress-forum-plugins

On your other issue, that is a big vague, the sub domain is a different product / service and essentially a seperate site so it needs to rank (or not) on it's own merit. As it happens, this is the problem you will have with the knowledgebase if you put it on a separate subdomain.

With no URL or an in depth look I can only give you generic advice but really, I would look to bring all of this under one domain and have one, well ranking site rather than 3 separate sites that all struggle.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

[qdigi]

Thanks Marcus - really great advice!

We checked out SupportPress on WooThemes and really liked it! Plus you are right as to how we can run it on our own domain.

What we might do is pick 5 keywords we want to rank for, and move all our sites under one domain - this should help spread the link juice through to the less performing sites, as our main site gets a lot more press and links.

Hopefully this is a good strategy!

Thanks for the help.