Hi Guys. Do you know if one can submit a forum to dmoz that is part of a website that is already listed in the directory?

Also, how does one obtain the forum.url.com address, instead of http://www.url.com/forum address? Im sure it has to do with hosting right?

Which address is "better" for the forum? Does it matter?

Sorry, Im pretty much new to everything......

There are definitely sites that are listed in DMOZ more than once. I think the subsection of the site would just need to be different enough from the main site. For example you may not be able to get listed once for each product you sell, but I think forum could qualify for a second listing.

As for the URL the one you have above would be what I would use. You want to use whatever URL is the one that points to the site. To find it just navigate to the main page of the forum and grab the URL from the address bar in your browser.

Great. Thank you.

One more thing about forums. I plan on using php bb (because its free) and was wondering what the issues are with optimizing forums. I see forums with hundreds of thousands of pages indexed, then I'll see the same size forum with 200 pages indexed.

I can't seem to find any up to date information on why this is. I do see alot written 3-4 years ago, but engines have changed alot since then, as we all know. I did hear something about sessions ids and google, and how they weren't too fond of them, but I don't know what they are.

It's hard to know why some of the forums haven't been indexed as much without looking at them in a little detail. It's possible that they've just traded links with spammy sites or done something on their pages the search engines don't like.

I'm not sure how much you can do on page to optimize a forum since you won't be writing most of the contet. Make sure the forum uses search friendly urls like this one does. See how the url repeats the title of the thread instead of just being a generic id= or something like that.

You can also help by organizing the forum topics. Mostly though your visitors will be providing your content. Just make sure to build a quality forum so people want to be there. If people like the forum they will link to it which will help with the search engines.

One thing about phpBB. Though I've never used it I hear it has issues with security. I think as long as you keep up with their patches and update the forum as soon as a new patch is released you'll be ok, but keep in mind you'll need to pay attention to those updates. As a forum user I've generally found vBulletin forums to be the easiest to use though I know there are some other good ones out there as well. Nothing wrong with free, but you do get what you pay for.