What to do about this subdomain for SEO?

[kelseyc]

This is a bit of an unusual structure and I'm having difficulty explaining the question so pardon my being a 'noob', haha. The website I'm working on has some content under Forums that is hosted on another domain.

The main website is https://yournorthside.org.au/ and if you select under the main Nav > Forums > Lived Experience it will take you to https://yournorthside.saneforums.org/t5/Lived-Experience-Forum/ct-p/lived-experience-forum. So it's as if it's a subdomain. (notice even the appearance of the main menu changes, weird) Apparently, saneforums.org has a requirement for that content to be on that subdomain. So therefore it's not part of my sitemap and now crawled or indexed.

My question is is this structure okay? What are the implications for SEO? Should I be looking to implement some type of no follow link or something? Or is it actually beneficial in terms of all their content gives us 'link juice'? Can you link me to any resources / articles that give further insight?

[iugac]

Hello! In terms of passing "link juice", if you do an analysis with Moz's OSE you will find that your domain has authority 11 and saneforums has authority 45. So, on one hand, it is good that they link to you in the menus and that the links are dofollow. However, as I understand it, the forums are the part of your website where people will interact and spend more time discussing different aspects. As such, on the long term, saneforums will benefit more because it serves people's interest more. From my point of view, it will be best if the forums are on your server and domain. However, if you cannot change this, I do not think that this structure is really bad. But this is only my opinion and I have no resources to recommend.

P.S. You need to work a bit on the page speed: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fyournorthside.org.au%2F&tab=desktop

[kelseyc]

Thanks for clarifying and explaining Cristian.

I know the speed is awful! I've just recently inherited the project so I'm trying to redo some of the pages aesthetically and work on speed issues in the near future as well. Thanks