SEO'ing a forum

How do you SEO a forum?

A forum usually consists of a whole bunch of topics, a lot of links and very little text.

Do you create an extra textual landing page with all the usual on-page optimizatin, and then point links to that page?

Your help, and some ideas, is appreciated.

ssteve

 

SEO techniques vary between boards, but some things you could do are: -

- Have an archive for the posts (default on vbulletin)
- Have a low graphic intensive skin, which the forum defaults to if a spider is viewing it
- Set all pages, so they are .html with the topic title in the filename url

 

Thanks, blue

I am doing those things to varying degrees (using phpbb, so no archive yet, but thinking about doing it).

I want to focus the thread on the issue of optimizing for key phrases.

I started thinking about seo issue with forums as I have started thinking about joining the ad network.

Let's say you have a "widget forums". You can optimize for the phrase "wideget forums", but that would draw very little. Most people would search for (e.g.) "fix a widget" or "buy widgets", so it is better to optimize for those.

But those phrases may not naturally occur in the forum. One idea, which might work, is to submit search results page for "fix a widget" which naturally returns a ton of text very much related to that pharse.

The other idea is to create some optimized landing pages for the key phrase.

In the above ideas, we are unfortunately not hitting the home page, but some other page (e.g. search result page).

Appreciate some feedback.

 

Things that work very good for me is making a few normal php pages, and just include the last 5 forum posts, like DP does on his free tools

Google visits my forum posts from those pages, and they rank well!

 

Dirkjan

How do you do this " last 5 posts " thingy?

I have VB 3.01

Thanks

 

Because my board is just starting out I actually created a site map off the index page with links to every post ---> Example . I have found it has increased the speed of pages being indexed. I know though, I won't be able to keep up with it as things progress but it seems to work as a jumpstart.

I figure then Google will be spidering more frequently on that part of the site due to the ever changing content. Of course I have almost completed the Mod Rewrite so that should speed things up too.

 

the single most important factor in SEOing a forum, in my opinion, is getting more incoming links. links = PR = deeper crawls. "entry pages" of forums work, but not nearly as well as having tens of thousands of internal threads all in google.

link to your archive on every page in the forum. link back to the forum index on every page. link to the forum index and the archive on every page of your site. get incoming external links to both as well.

oh. and MAKE SURE SESSION IDS ARE OFF (not usually an issue for vb3, but it can be for vb2, phpbb, etc)

 

Any question to do with forums I have to say - get the latest vBulletin. It's brilliant.

You can seo threads pretty easy on tons of topics if you start them yourself.

But really as disgust said - get the IBL's pointiong to the right places and even target threads with IBLs if you want.

Remember with vBulletin you can moderate topic titles and add a little seo to the way ppl phrase titles if you want.

 

After reading disgusts post and rereading mine, I think i left out a few details of what i did. My forum is a new section of an already frequently(and deeply) spidered main site that has thousands of links to it. By creating access to each post two clicks from home this has speed up the indexing big time.

Since I use a handcoded board, I don't have an archive feature (something to add ), so this is my way of creating a solution similar to what archiving creates,

So, basically....Yeah, what disgust said

 

(a) hmm...deep linking... egol on seochat had said the same thing. So I gather that 10 links to home page is not the same as 10 deep links.

(b) Also, I think disgust is helping me answer one of my on-going questions (many posts, no answers).

In a forum, one does not have much control over "copy", so SEO'ing for a single phrase or two is not optimal. e.g. if the forum is about cars, optimizing for "car forums" is not the thing, since people don't look for "car forums"... they look for "toyota engine problem", and that means deep linking.

(c) what are the advantages of VB's archive (I am a phpbb person). Besides having more compact html-reduced pages, does it offer any other advantages?

 

it's completely optimized to be spidered by google (and other search engines). they'll index vb3 "basic" pages too, but not nearly as well (or as fast).

for example, under one particular subforum, in the normal view, you might have 20 or 30 different topics listed (as well as a link to every poster's profile, etc). on the archive pages, you ONLY have links to topics- and usually 200 (?) per page.

 

Of course the flip side is that search engine user views this ugly text page, and has to click on "show with full formatting" to see it nicely formatted. I wonder what percentage of users go away in that process (but I think most users have got used to the ugly page idea by now)

 

I've recently set up a phpBB forum, which is hosted on another domain, and on every page there is a link to my primary domain. The reason I have done this is to increase the number of BL's to the primary domain.

At the moment they are over 400 'posts' that Google could spider, would this mean that I would have an additional 400 BLs to my primary domain? What I would like to do is place a sitemap on the new domain, which links to each post or thread, but it could take ages for Google to spider because it is a new domain.

Am I deafeating the whole purpose of setting up a forum, if I place the forum sitemap on my primary domain, which is spidered daily and have a good PR (for what that is worth!)

Any comments would be appreciated.

Darren

 

wwhomes,
I don't see the value of hosting your forums on a different domain. The other domain has to build its own pagerank, to be able to pass pagerank to your primay.

So unless you develop the 2ndary domain with pr and its own incoming links, I don't see any value.

Also a ton of links going back and forth between two domains (one having ref to the primary domain, and the other hosting the sitemap...) emm... I don't see the value.

So my recommendation, merge them into a single domain, and focus on developing that one.

I think multiple domains make sense ONLY if the themese are radically different so that visitors of one have no interest in the other.

 

Exactly, that is why I have them on seperate domains 1) is a resource for villa owners, and 2) is a holiday site for holidaymakers. This way you can do 3 way link exchanges and build up the secondary (new) domain AND primary domain at the sametime.