Greetings,

I'd like to expand my website into several where there is one central hub and several satellites that can be stand-alone but will also send information back to the hub, via rss, to be displayed on the home page. The satellite sites will require registration/login to contribute content. The hub also requires registration/login to participate in the discussion forums.

So, I'm wondering, should the satellite sites be separate domains, sub-domains, or sub-directories? Google and Yahoo do something similar to what I want and they use sub-domains. I'm wondering what would be best in regard to SEO, revenue generation, usability, etc.

--Robert

Robert,

Sub-domains would work best for your purpose. Just make a sub-directory and add a subdomain if you want it to be xxx.yourforum.com instead of yourforum.com/xxx

Dustin

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i would guess subdomains as well, you can better target your keywords etc that way

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Thanks for the responses!

It's awkward having multiple components (forums, news, articles) that require separate registration/login on the same website. I was originally going to use separate domains but had been leaning towards sub-domains to keep them 'all in the family'. I was wondering, do search engines favor domains over sub-domains?

--Robert

what forum software are you using?
if its phpbb3, i can help out on that

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I agree sub domains too.

I was looking into something similar to this about a year ago but never figured it out. A modder was looking at a way to pair up 2 vbulletin boards - merging the user base and scripts so that users could log onto either with the same details.

I think that one of the things to be careful about is that I was told that even sub domains are seen as separate domains for SEO purposes - so they might not like the duplicate content that may look like it's been copied from one site to another.

Just something to think about

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