Search engine optimization for forums

Search engine optimization for forums

by TheGodFather on May 22, 2007, 12:26:00
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Introduction

I started to write this article because after 1 year of running a small forum community I realize is not a simple task to maintain a forum. In a way I had luck because I start with the right forum: SMF. I didn't had any problem at software level (mods, security patches) because SMF Team is an very active team and the they have a great community. Anyway when we start talking about SEO then is other problem and I think this problem it is with all forums. A lot of this forums are not build with SEO in mind and if are forums build with SEO in mind they probably don't have so much features.

Advices

Anyway advices from this article are applied on all forums and not only for SMF forum.

The greatest enemy of our forums are the “Supplemental Listings” from Google. I think it doesn't exists a very well established forum without this “Supplemental Results” in Google index. Why this “Supplemental Listings” appear ? Are a lot of reasons why but most probably is because of duplicate and irrelevant content. Some advices to skip this problems:

1.Someone started the same thread on several forums if you detect that then you can choose what to do with this thread (move to recycle, delete or leave it.). Also if someone write an entire article on your forum just check with copyscape to see if this is already existing in Google index or not. If exists it is your decision if you keep that article or remove the entire thread. Also from time to time is good to check if your articles are in other forums/blogs and if you found them in other forums/blogs try to talk with the admin from there to remove them or to put a backlink to the original article.

2.Very short threads: If SE doesn't find anything relevant on your thread then is possible to go in “Supplemental results”.

3.Your forum doesn't have a good internal linking structure. Pay attention on every link on your forum and if are links to non relevant pages (login/registration/calendar) add a nofollow attribute to this anchor tags. In this way you will create a tight internal linking.

4.Get rid of session ID's and use some url beautifiers for your forum. I don't know if this exists for every forum but I know it exists for SMF (seo4smf) :)

5.Install a 301 redirect in your .htacess from your non-www to www or use google webmasters tools and set your preferred domain (just for google so is good to add a 301 redirect).

6.A lot of forums have a big problem ... multiple links to the same article for example forum/index.php?topic=12&message=X, forum/index.php?topic=12&prevnext=next for all this links you need to have and the main article without noindex need to be forum/index.php?topic=12. You need to check your forum to see if this is really working in your forum and if not just try to find some patches what is doing that.

7.Use description and keywords meta's in your forum, if this support, or search for some mods/patches for this. Anyway your description need to be bigger than 50 chars and smaller than 250 (maximum). I recommend descriptions to be around 200 chars.

8.If you installed some mods just check your page at w3.org and see if is ok because SE doesn't know to parse our pages perfectly. Anyway don't try to hunt every little mistake (like alt doesn't exist for img tag) just big mistakes like TD/TR/DIV/H1/etc is open and never closed.

9.Use h1 for your titles. YES is a problem even with smf with this. Try to edit your templates and add h1 on your titles .... but not on all titles ... just in first title from a thread :)

10.Improve quality of your forum posts ... Yes I know you cannot control what an user writes but you can add a recycle Bin on your forum and move irrelevant posts there.

11.Try to remove index.php from your forum and redirect index.php to /

12.Try to install a url beautifier because google or other SE doesn't like too many variables in your url.

13.Another problem on forum is the dynamic part of it. Look on your forum and be sure when you access a page what doesn't exits your forum return a 404 and not a 200 message error.

How bad are supplemental results ?

Matt Cutts is telling us about that in his blog http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/infrastructure-status-january-2007/
“As a reminder, supplemental results aren’t something to be afraid of; I’ve got pages from my site in the supplemental results, for example. A complete software rewrite of the infrastructure for supplemental results launched in Summer o’ 2005, and the supplemental results continue to get fresher. Having urls in the supplemental results doesn’t mean that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank. If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they’re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit). “
But keep in mind the most important is the ratio between indexed pages and supplemental pages. For example if you have 100 page indexed and 200 pages in supplemental you will get aprox. 5 visits per day from Google even your content is very very original. So in my opinion supplemental results are very IMPORTANT.

How to check for supplemental results in Google: site:www.your-site.com *** -view or site:www.your-site.com *** -sljktf

How to check for indexed pages in Google: site:www.your-site.com

Other SEO advices:

1.Get more quality links with high PR
2.Get an tight internal link structure
3.Get Social Bookmarks/Wikipedia and other links
4.Write good/original content.
5.Build the forum for your community and not for “money” and traffic.

Also you can read:

http://www.seobook.com/archives/002047.shtml
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/infrastructure-status-january-2007/

The article is not quite ready but will be soon. Just check this url for updates.
Any comments on this article is welcome

If you find this usefull just digg it :) here
Regards

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