I have read somewhere that forums get high up in the search ranking faster than shops, i have also been told to create a forum which is directly linked and about my shop hence high ranking forums and it will then take the shop higher in the rankings and faster can anyone clarify this for me please Ritchie
A lot of times, in my opinion & experience, quality articles on a forum get linked to all over the place and thus builds backlinks to your site, it can't hurt.
SEs have no way to identy what is and what isn't a forum, there are a lot of different kind of forum types. what i believe is that google and other search engines care about sites with content. A shop has no content, there are only product pics with small descriptions. If you create a shop with an articles section and add some rich content pages google may be around a lot more than if you create a simple shop. Again a forum is a way to generate content rich pages, there are many others.