What is the best forum website?

What is the best way to integrate a community platform or forum into an established content website?

• 1) From a URL structure perspective, why do many sites choose to put their forum on a sub domain (http://forum.mywebsite.com) when having it in a folder would usually be better from an SEO perspective (http://mywebsite.com/forum)? My website has a fairly good domain authority, so I would want the PageRank and authority to flow to the new community site in the best way possible, and eventually both ways if the community site is a huge success and attracts a lot of incoming links. 2) We intend hosting the community on a separate server entirely and integrating the two platforms on the front end via the menu structure and strategic internal linking. Is there any reason this would be a bad idea? Would this send a negative signal to the SE’s or be bad for our SEO in any way?   3) Is there anything else I should be aware of, or consider? Thanks, I appreciate any help or advice with this.

• Answer:

  1) I Imagine it's because they want to market/ target their forum separately, more like an add-on to the their main site than highly integrated. Also bolting-on a forum later on without having to think about internal linking implications (i.e: no need to let the CMS know  http://website.com/forum is in use) might be easier to set-up after the fact. I agree with what you suggest, adding a forum as a highly integrated part of your website would be better of when served at http://website.com/forum as opposed to http://forum.website.com imo. 2.) Hosting on a separate server of course gives some extra infra-admin on that server. On the other hand, things as scaling-out (forum is generally write heavy or at least more right heavy than your normal site), can be done separately. I'd advise you to put a reverse proxy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_proxy) in front of your forum: Your website running on say Apache Httpd can act as a reverse proxy by receiving a request from the web (say a request like http://website.com/forum/something-here) and have it internally redirected to your forum-server. From a SEO-standpoint it is as if all assets are on the same server. Moreover, it gives you flexbility to change your internal topology down the road if needed. 3) not that I'm aware of. Strategic cross-linking of your forum to your normal e-commerce site and back is done too little imo, and can really prove worthwhile: go for it. Hth