Separate domain name for a subdomain?

[FinanceSite]

I just created a subdomain to help our main TLD website. I was wondering if it's smart to create a separate TLD for this subdomain and set up a forward and build links to it.

Reason I was thinking about it because it would be easier for people to remember instead of typing in subdomain.maindomain.com.

But, I don't want the main website to suffer, since the purpose of creating this subdomain and it's content is to help the main domain.

Any inputs on this? Thank you.

[Francisco_Meza]

What I would probably do is build the whole thing out on the test.example.com and move the website from there to example.com.

[FinanceSite]

We're using joomla. The new project is with joomla 2.5, and the old one is joomla 1.5, which will take a while to upgrade, because of all those plugins and some plugins not working with the brand new joomla 2.5. But, we can make the template very similar to each other. Some plugins don't work well with each other and the SEF plugin. Both sites are quite huge, not the average size site.

[Francisco_Meza]

Would that screw up SEO if we forwarded that domain to www.mydomain.com/social or social.mydomain.com and built links to that?

If it's a new subdomain without link juice, just transfer the files to a folder.

I don't know if this will help out at all, but I'm putting it in here to demonstrate different softwares.

1) http://www.shipoverseas.com/ MAGENTO

2) http://www.shipoverseas.com/blog/ WORDPRESS

These are two completely different softwares, but the menus are the same. As you stated, you have different menus. WHY? What softwares are you using and why not just "bridge" them with a plugin?

1) Do you think it would be professional to have the social site there with a different look?

NO. I think more people would stop and wonder if they are on the same website.

I am looking forward to your response and would like to help

[FinanceSite]

This isn't a blog. We have created a social site for our website. I know that a folder would be better in general, but for this we needed a different plugins, extensions, template, etc.

So, we have www.mydomain.com. We created a social.mydomain.com.

I guess, we could create a folder called "social" and put our social website under that.... in that case it would be called www.mydomain.com/social, and just put a link there from the main website.

The 2 sites have different menus and have different templates. We will be updating the main site template soon to the new template, but they are still different. But that isn't really the main issue.

If we had transferred all the files into a subfolder,

1. Do you think it would be professional to have the social site there with a different look?

2. We bought the domain name: mysitesocial.com. Would that screw up SEO if we forwarded that domain to www.mydomain.com/social or social.mydomain.com and built links to that?

I appreciate your help!

[Copstead]

I guess my question would by, why are you creating a sub domain to help your  main domain?  All the effort you are putting into the sub domain, could be put into the main domain for more power.  This is why everyone suggests "www.example.com/blog" instead of "blog.example.com".

Depending on what you are doing, a sub domain or a different tld are going to have the same effect.  (I'm assuming your main domain is www.example.com)

I would suggest reading "Root Domains, Subdomains, Microsites and subfolders" from SEOmoz. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites