Should I move my forum to a subdomain?

[321Chat]

My forum causes a lot of 403, 404, soft 404 and 522 errors. I worry about this dragging down the value of my domain and wonder if I should move it to a sub directory. forum.domain.com.

I was forced to do this with a very similar site and seems to have not suffered any google penalty (I implemented a 301 redirect to each page to its corresponding page on the subdomain.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Well, as long as you still keep the sub domain open to search engines I don't think that would really solve the actual issue which is fixing the errors that you have. For now I wouldn't move the forum and focus on fixing the errors. Forums in general can be a great source of quality content in my opinion that can drive a ton of quality traffic + links that your SEO will benefit from. Moving it to a sub domain, even with a normal 301 redirect will cause more downside longer term for the root domain.

[Chris_Hickman]

Hello, you mentioned you have previously done this with 301 redirects. It is possible to do without penalties or losing rankings on your primary domain.

However, the problem arises that you are essentially splitting page authority with the sub-domain which can potentially be treated as a separate website. I would not recommend using sub-domain for your forum to avoid the issue of competing with your primary domain. Forums can be a great source of content and traffic so I would give it the best opportunity to do so on your  domain. It would also be good to spend some time on maintenance to correct those errors and moderate poor quality / spammy / and thin content if necessary.

If you do decide to use a sub-domain, you would want to make sure to provide relevant links on every page back to your primary domain. Best of luck with your forum.