Moving forum to subfolder

[Wedideas]

Hi,

we're thinking of moving our very well established forum to a subfolder on our main domain. I have read that this would be much better for seo reasons/domain authority rather than using a sub domain. Is this correct?

Our forum has 15,000 users and gets roughly over 502,087 impressions from 101,147 visits a month.

Thanks,

James

[StevenMapes]

Yes it will be better as a sub-domain will be treated separately.  Where is the forum currently located though, on a sub domain? If so make sure you keep the old URLs active with canonical tags or redirects to the new locations so that users and bots get pushed over.

The downside is that if your forum is likely to be penalised for spam, then it will start to effect the ranking of your whole site rather than just the subdomain.

[Daylan]

As Steven mentioned, you gotta be careful when doing this. As there is often a very long 'leash' as far as content on forums, i've heard of instances where adding a forum to the main domain has harmed popular SERPs for keywords and domain authority. Especially since Panda.

Perhaps check your numbers for your current forum first. See if you can notice anything that may be harming or improved with the current forum site and fix those before you migrate in.

There was a conversation about this earlier in the week that might help you out a little more:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/sudden-drop-in-ranks-and-traffic-after-migrating-community-website-into-main-domain

Good luck

[Wedideas]

Thanks Steven,

Why would our forum get penalised for spam? I've never heard of this happening to us. What would be the cause?

Our forum is on a full domain www.weddingideaschat.com. I am thinking of putting it on our website www.weddingideasmag.com so it looks like www.weddingideasmag.com/forum

James

[Wedideas]

Hi Daylan,

Thanks for the link, it was interesting reading.

"Perhaps check your numbers for your current forum first. See if you can notice anything that may be harming or improved with the current forum site and fix those before you migrate in."

How would I go about this?

Thanks,

James

[StevenMapes]

Forums are open ended so you can easily end up with pages that are low in quality content and with post-panda google this could have a negative effect on the whole domain.  Forums are also targeted for link building schemes which, unless actively moderated, could end up with you linking to lots of illegal sites that could end up penalising you.