What are the disadvantages of putting your forum on your homepage (i.e. 'My Forum Domain .com' rather than 'My Forum Domain .com/forum')

One disadvantage that I know about is that if I put my forum on my homepage then I cant really turn it into a 'portal site' should I want to in the future.

If I put my forum in 'My Forum Domain .com/forum' then that gives me more flexibility. I could have a homepage with links to articles, latest posts, news etc.

However, I would have to create a homepage that is compelling enough to encourage people to click through to the forum.

I know that this can be achieved in a number of ways but its more work and I could still lose some traffic to those other pages. Also, it is possible that over time, if the forum became popular, the main forum page might have a higher page rank than the homepage through people linking to it.

My initial thoughts are that it is simpler to simply have the forum on the homepage.....any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

What is the domain, if it is nicheforum.com then I would use it as the homepage, but if it is nicheworld.com I would put it in /forums and redirect / to go there.

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I think in most cases forums should have a homepage. It gives you more great unique content and the search engines love that. And overall it just gives your users more to do at your site.

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If you're solely planning on running a forum and nothing more, then use the forum in the root directory. If you are looking to add-on to the forum, whether now or later, I'd setup a 'portal' now and set the forums in another directory.

The forum will index just as well in another folder as it will on the index, provided there are links to it and you setup your robots.txt folder to index only the directories and pages you want to have indexed.

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It sounds like you want to do exactly what we did here at AF...Your forum as a home page is always good, but you are right in that it restricts you in the future if you ever want a front page/main site. Why not put your forum in a directory (/forums/) and just redirect anything from the main domain to your /forums/ until you know what you want to do to the front page and find the time to do it.

That's what I would do did

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You can always move it. It's not difficult to change the directory of where a bunch of files are stored. I had my forum on the main domain root then wanted vBAdvanced so I moved it to a 'forums' folder and installed on the root.

The only problem I see is if your URL is http://xxxxxxxxxforum.com because http://xxxxxxxxxforum.com/forums just looks silly.

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the only problem on moving it is that if your site gets indexed by google or whatever all those links will be pointless

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I guess so, Will.. I'm not bothered by that though. My forum is about the people who post on it, not the search engines who index it. Which is not to say you're any different in that respect, it's just that I am not terribly bothered by rankings and what not.

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Yeah, this is imo the best way using a 301 redirect. Then if you decide you want a front page you can without having to move the forum and render all the incoming links void.

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if you have it in root and want to add a portal page or a front page later just call it what you want and define it as the DirectoryIndex in .htaccess.

Is there any disadvantage to this? works on all browsers i've tried it on.

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