Can someone educate me about the pros and cons of this website approach?

[OneGrassRoot]

I want to use a social networking platform that will be installed as a subdomain.

What are the pros and cons of having a website -- the main pages -- hosted one place, and pointing to another site set up as a subdomain? It is seamless as far as the visitor's experience.

The pro aspect, to me, is that if one site is down for some reason, the other is still available.

But does this approach -- linking to external links from subdomains - mess with SEO in a bad way?

Thanks. :)

[mkultra]

1. i didnt know you could point s subdomain to a different host

Seems like it would be easier just to redirect

[sandnsea]

2. Not sure what you mean

I have one site set up like this, one on my server and the other on the ning server. The search engine finds them separately. I should have the ning site better linked into the main site, just haven't taken the time. It's also clearly not seamless.

http://www.florenceoregon.net

http://www.florenceoregon.ning.com

Or are you planning to do more of a redirect technique and think google will get mad with what might look like a redirect to fool search results. As long as you aren't doing any blatant cloaking or stuffing, probably not. It's actually kind of hard to get banned in google, it takes multiple pages of blackhat to get their attention.