[Bellinis]

Maybe this is absolutely irrelevant for SEO, but I just want to be sure:

Soon I will switch from one bulletin board to vbulletin 3.5 and now I'm thinking about where to install my forums.

My options:

1. http://www.mysite.com/forum
2. http://forum.mysite.com
3. http://www.mysite.com/board /forums/vbulletin etc

Does installing it on a subdomain have any advantage/disadvantage?

Any ideas are more than welcome!

[T2DMan]

Hi

I personally have my forum on a subdomain. My main domain is for "online booking" and a full service website for the restaurants. This subdomain has listings for many of the restaurants in New Zealand and gives listing details only. Therefore they are separate beasts, and I did not want there to be too much confusion between the two for marketing purposes.

I have also made sure that there are virtually no live links between the two websites (ie links most links are rel=nofollow). In this way, I am able to get dual listings on the serps. Normally if you have too many links between two sites, you will get only a single listing on Google - for the site with the strongest page for that term.

So the way I have done it means that I have the potential to have two indented results being the top 4 results out of ten for a number of SERP's.

You also have to remember the length of the url's. You want to keep the domain name part of the url relatively short, so you have the max amount visible for the searcher to see with the forum paths.

Also remember that a subdomain is a separate domain for Google - if you have worked hard to get PR and visibility on the serps for your main domain (out of sandbox), then probably best to stick with the main domain rather than risk the possibility of being in the sandbox for a while with the subdomain.

So... pros and cons for both. You just have to weight up what makes sense for you.

[Bellinis]

Hi T2DMan,

Thank you very much for your pretty reply and excuse me for responding so late.
Especially from the last part of your text I decided to create my new board at /board. My live site is currently located at /forum and next friday I will shut my live board down, import it into the new one, cutomize it, and go back online a.s.a.p. (I hope).

This brings me to a new question and I hope you can give me some advice:
After I've shut down my live board I would like all (indexed) pages to be redirected to a under construction page, while I will still be able to access the /board pages where I will be working on the new board.

How can I do that?

And after I've opened up my new board, I will just do a .htaccess redirect like this? :
redirect 301 /forum/ http://www.mysite.com

Thank you very much in advance

[T2DMan]

With vBulletin, you can shut it down by flicking a switch in the top options menu in admincp. Is there an equivalent in your package?

Otherwise, create a page of your own. Find the main config include file that most of the programs call, and do an include to your alternative page. Should work well.

Regarding the htaccess, personally I have not used that redirect type. If it works, great. Good to see that you have it as a 301 redirect.