Forum SEO

Forum SEO

Ok have a forum which is newish and was wondering how you can go around SEO it , as the content is always changing so density can go out of the window

Any ideas

Thanks for you time

 

What forum software do you use?

 

Use VB

Have done a few things

Some old - links , sitemap ect plus altered the way the title is displayed ie post first plus description has the post in it

 

I'm no expert on forums, but that has never stopped me from commenting before.

I think it is difficult to do conventional SEO for a forum. Google in particular seem to like forums, but the trick seems to be to get enough members and content make the SEs interested. There are often more SE bots visiting this forum than real live member -- or dead members either for that matter .

I know some other forum owners have actually used AdWord ads in the beginning to build up membership.

Having said all that it still wouldn't hurt to get as many backlinks as possible to your forum. Are you participating in Shawn's new Ads Network?

Do you know Brian of BriteCorp? He is I Brian on this forum. He has just started a very interesting service whereby he is offering 50 links per day -- that 1,500 per month and 10,000 over 6 months -- for the tidy little price of 39.95 pounds per month.

 

which forum are you using? well, here are some small tips- they work wondefully for us, we get around 2,000 unique visitors a day finding out forums.

make it se-friendly. this isn't the same as "SEO," really. you're not optimizing the pages, you're just allowing them to crawl.

1st: remove session ids on the forums, either for that specific bot or completely
2nd: make the urls more friendly, probably using mod rewrite

once you've done that, you just need to throw a LOT of PR at the forum, since it will determine how far down the search engines will crawl.

you can either have the "live forums" be indexed or have a stripped down "forum archive" that gets indexed. we use an archive, but plenty of forums work just fine with the live version.

our archive's here in case you're curious: http://forums.ffshrine.org/archive/

we have 12,000~ pages indexed so far.

 

I don't know about VB but what helped a lot on one of our phpBB installations was installing a modification which removes guest IDs.
While Google does index viewtopic.php?t=349 it does not like the attached guest ID at all. this was the one and only modification to this phpBB installation and since the update Google indexed almost all of our forum threads, even the older ones.

 

vbulletin 2.x still does, in case you use that.

if you (or anyone) uses 2.x you can get a hack to remove SIDs from vbulletin.org

 

Thanks guys some good pionts

Yes thanks Shawn

Have that all set up

I think this is a learning curve - have been ok at getting sites listed but will have to suck it and see - If I find anything of interest I will post it

 

You could also try poaching users from related forums. Poaching isn't strictly the best description as your users would be free to go back and forth between the forums but still ... find a few decent fishing forums that you find useful/have a large user base and start posting your thoughts and commentary; provide you include a nicely written signature then users will almost certainly check out your forum to see what's on offer.

 

Don't forget to post yourself. You might not get any replies at first, but nothing attracts more content like having more content.

 

I've seen a few sites suggest that at the very, very start you may want to actually register multiple accounts and have conversations with yourself...

it may seem odd, but if you've ever had trouble getting a forum started up, it really makes sense in a way.

 

The forum has started well with over Posts: 8,429 so far

It the seo side Im tring to tweek

 

Oh yes I remember this.

And you always win the argument.

Mick

 

Well, it would be a bitch if you lost

 

Where did you make this modification? I am adding a phpBB forum to my site and would like it too be indexed also.

 

for phpBB visit PHP Hacks and look for seo hacks ... they are easy and simple to install.

 

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

 

Do you recall the name of the modification which removed the guest ID's? I am setting up a forum and wanting it to be SE friendly. I'm using PhpBB 2.0.10..insight appreciated.
Thanks a bunch.

 

Think I found what I was looking for here..sorry for the previous posting. I'll try this out and let group know how I make out with it.
http://www.phpbbhacks.com/download/2040