hi there, i have a site that get lots of visitor and have ad an active forum for years. I never did any thing for the SEO since my user were coming from other places. im now starting to take care of my seo, adding content and backlinks. The thing is, i didnt know that for all those years but the forum i had was set as 'Disallow' in the robot.txt file, which means all the forum posts were never indexed. im now thinking of making the forum indexed to show google i have lots of dynamic content. the thing is, if i let a huge amount of post to get indexed in one go, wouldn't google slap me ? i mean its a huge amount of pages suddenly getting indexed. should i be worried or not ? what should i do ? Thanks!
You shouldn't worry, Google won't index your pages all at once. Their crawler will start crawling your website slowly so your pages will get indexed at different times. In addition they will also see that your forum has been around for a while and will know that the posts were not from automated sources.
Yes, you should allow search engine to index those pages and as said above, SE will not indexed all of them suddenly nor all will be indexed. I will also suggest you to submit a sitemap to webmaster tool so that they can be easily indexed.
there are tons of forum out there that allow indexing and they doing fine.. to make the most out of it, find someone to moderate it to avoid unnecessary post or spammers..
forum optimization is really a good idea to get google's attention. and yes if you make your forum robot allowed then surely you will going to get the best result for ur forum.. and there is no google slap for that because you have the unique content in each forum and the indexed pages are not going to come all at once, it will take time and that's where your benefit comes...
Absolutely let your forum posts to get indexed; more content is more keywords = more visits (or at least impressions). This forum is indexed by G and they get a lot of traffic from that I'm sure. As mentioned above, just make sure to keep up with the spam.
Thanks a lot for the comment guys. i will let it index. is there anything else i should do to optimize its SEO benefits ?
You made the right decision. Another thing is, do you have SEO-friendly URL's? For example, when you view a topic on your forum, what does the URL say?
You should allow the forum post to get indexed because that's a unique content and it might attrack lots of traffic from it.
that how the posts look like: mysite.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=11678&forum=3 how is that in term of SEO ?
Not good...check for SEO plugins for your forum CMS... Ideally you want the URL to look like mysite.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=the-topic-name&forum=the-forum-name You don't want query strings or random numbers, but rather text that describes the page (preferably keywords).