I recently made it to the first page of Google. I've recently been doing alot of promotion for my forums as their own entity. In your experience, is it difficult to get a sub area of your site (like /forums) to appear as a second listing below your main page? Will that sub area need to have as many links as the other results in the SERPS to show? Thanks for an idea!
I recently made an attempt at this with our PR 7 site (subpage was PR 6 and keyword-loaded). For one day the API showed we were 1+2 for 3 or 4 keywords, but then that afternoon Google dropped the second page. We are trying some more backlinking to try to make this work (currently our main page has 200+ backlinks, and the subpage in question has <10). If we get any where I'll update the thread.
Yah, my homepage is PR5 and this subpage is PR4 but I bet i can get the subpage up to 5 with enough links of it's own. There has been an older site in the top 10 of the results which was showing two pages and taking up two spots, I finally bumped them back to the second page. I should examine what kinds of links point to both of them and see what the deal is. The reason I've been thinking about this is a list of 37 forum only directories I just submitted to and got at least 15 new links, I think it would be totally possible to promote my forums as a seperate entity and get it up with my listing. I'll have to put my /forums address in the keyword tracker and see if I'm showing anywhere at all.
I have many pages that are double linked like that. I've found that SEO inside of my (very active) forum has caused me to rank up highly on many various topics. (If you don't believe me, search for 'flythecopter' -- a very popular flash game of old, I'm now ranking #2 and #4 for that topic, just from forum posts.) I'd have to say that at least 50% of my traffic is by keywords that I do NOT target. They are unintentional links that I gain from my forum posts. Granted, I keep my forum 99% on topic, so most posts are related to my business (which helps in traffic generation), but I get quite a few strange in-bound clicks from search engines because of this. DS
I suspect it is easier for forum owners to do this kind of thing. I feel like my strategy only partially worked because the subpage I was promoting couldn't hold its own against my competitor's homepages. I will say that once the sub pages actually got indexed, it was not hard to get them to "attach" to my #1 ranking page. I believe once the spider recognized the BLs and the keywords on the subpages it ranked them in the 50-150 SERP range, but after a few days of additional linking, it attached them to the #1 ranking, effectively allowing the subpages to jump from nearly-nonexistant to front page results (if only for a couple of hours, when it realized that they weren't as relevant as competitive results). It's worth a shot, but I think it works better with low (read: extremely low) competition keywords.
I haven't SEO'd my VBulletin forums yet have no problem getting them indexed in Google with an out-of-the-box installation. I'm aware of certain plugins that help spiders but both my forum and my archives are thoroughly indexed. As my original question asked, has anyone tried actively pointing links to a seperate page in order to get that page as the second listing, does it work?
I generally find if one page is strong (link wise) and another strong content wise and linked from the original they will both be listed. Though I have no hard and fast way of guaranteeing this.