I have a webpage concerning a subject, let's say buttons to keep it simple. It is the foremost web page on this topic for my language and region: searching for 'button' in my language will always display my webpage in the top stop (after the paid adds).
However, since my language is grammatically more complex than English, the word can be written in different forms & cases. Searching via Google using one particular way of writing 'button' will display my forum in the top spot instead of the landing page. Then my competitors are listed as following hits, but not my landing page.
This is not ideal for me because the landing page is designed to be friendly to new users and offers far more useful information than the forum. In fact, the forum is mostly there for the loyal and hardcore users who already know where to find it while for new users it is way too specialized.
What would be a good course of action to correct this problem? I could block search bots from indexing the forum - attempting to guess Google's logic they are possibly trying to give several possible websites for a given query and then select the most appropriate subpage to 'represent' that web app, thus removing the forum could make Google pick the landing page instead (or a number of other subpages, really, anything but the forum). But of course I'm afraid of simply losing my search ranking without gaining anything.
A link of type canonical isn't the tool to use, either, because the landing page and forum's content definitely isn't the same. A link with rel='home' is another option, though honestly it doesn't make sense that it would affect search results. Perhaps moving the forum to its own subdomain, e.g. forum.buttons.com instead of buttons.com/forum would help?
