curious to who did the audit and why they recommended it

agree. sounds odd. http://forum.x.com is better than http://x.com/forum???

afraid no internal way to do that with WP and SP… the forum appears on a single page in your wp install… a subdomain would be outside the current wp install…

That said, I think a couple folks did something similar using redirection via .htaccess… but afraid I dont know the details…

Yoast did the audit.  https://yoast.com/problem-with-post-edit-buttonire-us/website-review/

Their comments:

“It’s always very hard to optimize forums, as they are filled with user generated content. Which is why we usually decide to put them on a subdomain (forum.example.com) instead of in a subdirectory (example.com/forum). That way they don’t interfere with the rankings of your main website, and thus your most rank worthy content.The forum is on your website, which means the content could hurt your rankings. Move the forum to a subdomain instead.”

This was news to me as well. I plan to discuss with them; I’ll give you an update.

Still same answer…. Other option is to install another wp on subhuman and put forum there….

we use yoast as well and have no issues with our blog or our forum with ranking, here are a couple searches you can try to see

one of our members asked about raising dexter cattle the other day

google experience with dexter cattle

we are on the first page of google

I made a thread about a youtube video on growing m&m’s to get kids interested in gardening

if you google how to grow m&m we are in the top 5 for google,and this thread was made just the other day after I had imported to simple press

as far as our blog, if you google pallet chicken coop, we are the first hit on google

one thing I did do though when submitting the sitemap to google is when I submitted the sitemap_index it was giving a wrong date error for the forums, so I deleted the sitemap and submitted all the individual sitemaps instead, as you can see here the forum is getting indexed with no problem, the warnings for the post one is due to having wp-includes blocked in robot.txt

the only issues we run into usually is when it is a pretty common search term, but we still usually end up being in the first 3 or 4 pages of google, and usually we show up higher in bing and yahoo, for example zeroing in a scope, thats a pretty common question and search term, we are in the middle of page 4 for google but the top of page 3 on both bing and yahoo

good luck

kvr, thanks for the insight.  To clarify… Yes, we do “use” the Yoast SEO product; my point is that we engaged Yoast  (they also offer services) to audit our site.  By the way, I discovered that Yoast is highly qualified in the SEO world… Joost was a key player in planning the huge domain changes at the Guardian sites.

I should also mention that this particular audit was not really SEO-focused. I think their ‘forum’ comment might have been a standard FYI. I’ve reached out to discuss this with them.

Google is crawling our sitemaps with no errors in Google Webmaster. And the forum is indexed.

Overall, we’ve taken a hit on organic results. However, I don’t blame the forums for this. Late 2013 we migrated to WP and changed hosts; I think we’re still in recovery mode.

On our old site we had phpBB forums in a sub-domain. The sub-domain decision was for organizational purposes only, not SEO. I never gave it a second thought.

I’ll keep you posted.

Well there is no technical reason SP can not run in a sub-domain but the sub-domain has to be a fully functional WordPress install. And you would need to replicate the forum tables AND the user/usermeta tables as minimum.

Okay, thanks.

glad to help….