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I have a blog site example.com (WordPress) and have 10,000 (Alexa 30,000) visitors daily. We've decided to start a forum under example.com/forum/ (vBulletin)

Is this a wise idea for SEO? Should I upload a site map of the forum or I should let Google find the forum on its own?

What are the SEO implications of this method? Should I use a separate domain for the forum?

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    Sitemaps almost never help SEO. Sometimes they can help Googlebot discover URLs faster, but most forum software is designed to be crawlable by Googlebot and the sitemap won't help much. Site maps don't improve rankings. See Q: The Sitemap Paradox
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Feb 17, 2016 at 10:49

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If you already running WordPress blog, then I suggest to go with subdomain, because there is some benefits.

  1. Google will not penalize your whole site in future for low quality content, Generally, when people ask any question, and there is no answer, then it is consider as low quality webpage.

  2. You can provide someone else(like developer or programmer) to control your forum without affecting to main domain.

  3. You can host your forum on other server for better security. May be there are some good host that works cool with forum software like Mybb or vBulletin.

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    Very good points! Especially these days where quite a few forum sites have been pinged by Google. Forum sites are perfectly valid of course, however, since so many low quality forums have existed, Google now sees forum based sites as being low quality overall even when they may not be. As well, forum sites generally are not topically focused as well as a post based site. This means that they can potentially dilute the search potential of a post based site. Security is always an issue. Simplifying site structures and compartmentalizing applications can really help. Cheers!!
    – closetnoc
    Feb 17, 2016 at 17:22

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