seperate domain for content and forums?

[Cloughie]

Hi,

I have been running two sites for my content and forums for a good 5 years now.www.wannabebig.com and www.wannabebigforums.com

I am current thick into a full redesign of www.wannabebig.com - new design and article management system.

Page rank on both sites is low, but I am going to change that once I get the new site up. I am going to REALLY focus on building incoming links etc.

I was thinking about pulling the forums back to the www.wannabebig.com domain (i.e /forums) so that everything sites on the one domain which I figure would be better from an incoming links and page rank point of view. Also I find most people just go to www.wannabebigforums.com and never see the sother site which would help with that.

What are the pro's and cons of moving the forums from www.wannabebigforums.com back to www.wannabebig.com/forums?

[Chris]

Well, Sitepoint did it awhile ago, there are pros and cons as you say.

Almost all of my forums are built off a content site domain, not their own domain, and I think that setup works better, but as you say, you've had it for years, and you will lose incoming links, so it is a risk.

[Cloughie]

Yeah, I noticed sitepoint pulled it back to sitepoint.com/forums from sitepointforums.com some time ago and this must have been much more risky for them as they are large and probably had a hell of a lot of links going into them. I figured they thought we probably better get it right, take the hit and build on that.

I figure the risk is lower for me as I have never focused on incoming links and my rank is low, and given that I want to create a closer link between the two sites AND I am going to start building link power shortly, it kind of makes sense to get things in the right place before I go to town with things. I have put a lot of effort into redesigning www.wannabebig.com, so I may aswell go about things in the right way for the long term.

Scary................ :)

What's the best way to limit any damage? Just get the forums domain to redirect to the new url?

[allout]

I think you are better to keep the separate domains since you have two sites that are connected yet separate and you can do double promotion on the two. The other advantage is if you ever want to unload one and still keep one, they are for all intent and purposes separate sites.

This is the way I have always preferred but I am sure their are many who will not agree since like Chris stated, the combines is the way many have done it it in the past.