I have a computer blog that performs well in google and gets 500-600 visitors per day, i was planning on incorporating a forum into the site and i need some feedback on the idea. First of all is the computer and internet niche too saturated to build a forum?i was wondering with the backlinks and traffic i have i might have an edge. Also i was planning on using vbulletin, is it possible to merge the sitemaps with wordpress on the root directory?I have a very tight budget and it would be ideal if i could use a free forum like phpbb instead, would i be missing out on a lot of traffic and functionality if i use phpbb or is it good enough? Thanks in advance.
I suggest you to Open a forum as in subdomain" , so that people can interact on forum And about your questions of sitemap and SEO thing, as u will have SUB-DOMAIN , no problem should be occur ! You can submit a site-map , via VBSEO site-map generator
Hey Luq - good to see you again. I'll be writing an article for the blog this week. Finally done with my travels. I didn't have much luck with a free forum. I tried using all of the safeguards for spam but it got overrun by spammers. Maybe I just didn't use it right - I dunno. I used phpBB. I can say that since I've used vbulletin I have had almost zero spam problems. You can't go wrong with vbulletin in my opinion
Thanks for the replies, i hav already kicked things off using simplemachines on a directory, about the subdomain, i found using a directory on a main domain to provide better seo benefits so i am going to keep it the way it is. Brett, good to hear you are back , spam can be overwhelming i know, i tried phpbb once around a year back and got pretty much run over, however i dont really have the investment for vb + vbseo right now so im starting off with smf for now. Hopefully i should find a way to put a leash on the spammers like some of the successful forums today that run on free software.
I didnt even get vbseo - I use the free version to get the sitemap, then zoints SEO plugin for the url rewrites. So all I really paid for is vbulletin. Good luck on the site. I'll join once it's setup
Once your forum starts gaining some serious traffic you might want to incorporate vbseo into it, ive heard it's amazing for google traffic, thanks id appreciate a sign up, ive just about got it setup now, time to start promoting it and get some posts rolling.