We run an ecommerce store here and we're adding some functionality for our customers to make their own page/content. We're looking to do this in order to help customers share their information as well as helping us with SEO. We're hoping the influx of fresh-new content should be a big help.

Our internal debate here is whether we should keep this information on a sub-domain such as:

http*//customer-content.domain.com/username

..or host the content on a completey separate domain and include links to our e-commerce store. My concern with putting the content on a new domain is SEO effect will be minimal since customers will likely not be linking to our e-commerce domain much. We want to keep self-promotion on these user-contributed page to a minimum - at the most we'll have a link in the footer to our ecommerce store.

So the question is what would have the best impact for SEO - hosting the user content on a sub-domain or put the content on a completely separate domain?

[edited by: caveman at 5:31 am (utc) on May 7, 2007]
[edit reason] Delinked link. [/edit]