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I'm using PHPBB as a Feed Aggregator in order to provide a nice service to my end users. Because i'm pulling feeds into PHPBB topics, each Topic has a link to the original Article.

Here's my question:

Today my forum sits on: -http://forum.domain.com however after reading the (Sub Domain Vs. Sub Directory) I'm going to move the forum to be a Sub Directory so it will be -http://www.domain.com/forum

Before I do that however, I want to make sure that my forum which today has "not the greatest" page rank does not negativly impact the rest of my site - -http://www.domain.com - due to all the feed aggregation and links to external pages.

I bring this up because in your post here: http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/seo-pri ... vt661.html it was mentioned that having to many links to other sites could impact the page rank and indexing of the root site. If this is true, I will need to rethink the move of my forum from a sub domain to a sub folder.

Thanks,

-Steve

So, for now, your forum is installed in a sub domain, and many topics in it do backlink to the main domain's articles ? Or are the articles on a different domain ?

Assuming that you are in the case where the forum sub domain represent too many pages in comparison with the main domain, you should obtain better results if you move it to a sub folder of the main one (as long as you HTTP 301 redirect all the sub domain to the new location).

Then, about the link to the articles in the forum topics, if the article are posted in the main domain, they won't be external any more, so they won't "cost" the same way they did in the sub folder.

I don't think that this would negatively impact the main domain, it can stop the PageRank growth for couple month, but will end up to be better for the main domain, which will turn out to have more pages with content than before.

Now if the articles are almost all coming from other domains, you will increase the amount of the main domain's external links. External links can cost a bit PR, but if they are posted on thread with some good content, it will still be better overall.

It's all a matter of how good or bad is your forum content, and how much pages do it have compared to the main domain.

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