Hi I just wanted to drop a note here. When starting a forum the main problem you have is that you don't have much content and without content you don't get many visitors from Search engines. The easiest way to get content on your forum is to create an extra "News" Forum, find a few RSS Feeds about your theme and use the RSS Feature of vBulletin to post these news into your newly created news forum. Over time this forum will fill up with hundreds and thousands of news posts which get all listed by google & co and bring in new visitors. Even if you have an established forum and a good load of content already, it never hurts to have more. Especially not if it is free and constantly fresh It sounds like a no brainer but I don't see it very often. A few tips: Exclude the news forum from New Posts by editing the link to: domain.com/search.php?do=getnew&exclude=ForumID Exclude it from "the last X replies" if you use the hack. Exclude it from newsletters and so on. USE IT. Your members wount mind and mostly ignore it, but if the RSS Feeds fit your theme you get tons of new visitors over time Examples: http://www.patientenfragen.net/ -> Nachrichten StarBuG
thanks for the trick... since its just an rss feed, the content is already on the source website and posting it verbatim in the forums would only create duplicate content so in an empty forum if the only available content is duplicate stuff from feeds wont google give it a slap ????
It does not replace self created content in any way but it adds to it. I am using it on two of my forums and the visitor count increased quite a bit. I also had a PR jump from 3 to 5 on both forums. I don't think google will punish it cause RSS was created exactly for this purpose. It is not the whole article that is posted, just the headline, a few sentence and a link to the source. I think that is the way google identifies it as RSS and not as duplicate content
It is a good idea and I have seen it used on a few forums. The only problem is that you still need to get traffic to your site. Having content on the site is only a small part of building a good forum. The other downside is that many people will know that they are feeds and think that is all that you offer. It is a great idea as a supplement to adding original live content from either yourself or hired posters. People can not interact with live feeds and that is the whole purpose of a forum. Thanks for sharing your idea!
The main purpose of having more content for Search Engines to list is to get more visitors from Search Engines. Google brings in a ton more traffic since I started this. My forum is more active then ever and my users generate more content themselfs every day. Like I said, the RSS news are not a replacement for own content it is just a way to get easy new content and keywords for search engines. And now and then some interesting articles for your members to read. Depending on how well you selected the news feeds. It works great for me on two of my forums, what you do with it is your choice.
That is why I put trick into quotation marks But ADs are different then content! Content is constant and creates a lot of new keywords for search engines. So it is different
Where would I go to look for specific topic RSS feeds? I have thought about this before, however I don't really know much about it except that it posts new/content automatically.
Yeah I done that straight after my post, I just didn't think my topic would have RSS. I was wrong lol, thanks anyways.
i've done that on www.Computerforumz.com for a few of my threads. It is not a a bad approach to creating new content and i've had several good discussions created from these bots. But i think it is also important to declare to your members that they are bots, so that they won't feel tricked or think its spam. Just a tip
Check a news feed post on my forum to see how I do it http://www.patientenfragen.net/nach...en-gefaehrliche-medikamente-umlauf-t6327.html