In a particular niche I keep track of three forums and their PR have all been doing great. And more importantly, whenever I do a search nowadays the SERP pages are packed with numerous forum posts. Is Google favoring user-generated contents more than before? Is activity gaining more weight as compared to, say authority? Not sure if it is a general trend or just my experience with that niche, what is your take?
hard to say. i think alot more forums are doing seo so that may be why they're in the google serps more.
Yep, over 50% of my forum traffic is direct from google, its been rising dramatically recently. I put it down to my SEO'ing of the site.
It makes sense... lots of new fresh and often original new content every day... google's always love this... Still not many forums actually rank that high if you look at their PR (PR bar)... I would have thought they'd get a lot of links from places since they come up so often in search results...
I think most of forum thread ranks higher for a specific topic because most of the reply on thread uses the keyword on the replies.
agree with baby! most of the forums ranks higher cause of the daily new content and automatic keywords optimization.
Google loves forums... one important factor IMO is that SEOed forums have lots of long tail keywords in the URL.
I was thinking that my forum got penalized for having so many out links and very few inlinks, my users always posting links to youtube videos or other website news etc my forum has been up for almost a year and getting lots of traffic but never got a PR at all this time around, whereas other sites of mine with way less relevance got ranked I wonder if I would be better off if I set up a nofollow thing? google is not indexing anywhere near as much of my forum as I hoped
Sort of.. Google has done alot recently with the QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) part of the algo. With the whole vote from page A to B determining authority, it's slightly flawed because old irrelevant documents can take out page one while new relevant pages struggle until they get alot of links. By the time they build links and rank, the info can be outdated... So QDF is becoming more important in the algo. Forums by nature recieve alot of new pages daily, so they benefit from QDF. However this isn't just forum specific, it applies just as much to a Blog or regular website if content is generated at the same level. Also the level of QDF is niche specific, topics on things like the latest stock market info, the war in Iraq, the Superbowl scores etc are more likely to be effected by QDF. Hope this explains some.
Google loves user-generated content. That's why Yahoo Answers started to gain higher and higher rankings for many keywords and that's also why forums receive many search engine traffic.
Is the fact that forums make your site grow every day a factor? Most of my links come from within my own site. Meaning every new forum thread is another set of links....