SEO for Forums

Some of the biggest and most useful sites on the net are strictly forums, offering no static web pages or traditional content at all, but just places for people to discuss certain topics. Most of us have probably started up a forum at some point, and most of us have probably had to bare the embarrassment of ending up with 5 members and 3 posts, one of which is still the default ‘Welcome to Forum-Package-X’ message. The reason that so many forums die out is because unless you have a user base large enough to self perpetuate (i.e. enough people that your site grows exponentially, without your involvement), your forums will need constant promotion and advertisement.

A factor which is consistently over looked in forums is SEO. As a result forums often don’t rank well, if at all, and are commonly indexed less often than blogs or websites. By applying some simple SEO functions to your forums you can drastically increase the traffic it receives from search engines and it’s exposure in general.

1. Pretty Permalinks

Permalinks is a term more often used in blogging than forums, but the concept is exactly the same. By default a thread in your forum may have a URL that looks something like http://www.yoursite.com/forums/index.php?topic=13&post=4495. For search engines, the URL, especially the very last part, is important and helps your ranking a good deal. By modifying your permalinks you can have something like http://www.yoursite.com/forums/seo/how-to-get-ranked-quickly which looks a lot better to visitors and search engines alike, and gives you some extra juice when someone links to you too.

phpBB SEO – http://www.phpbb-seo.com – offers a variety of tools and mods for phpBB which enable custom permalinks. They also have a community based around optimizing phpBB which offers alot of great information.

2. Use a little nofollow

Nofollow is a new (introduced in 2005) attribute which can be applied to hyperlinks like this: <a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.seanbluestone.com”>SeanBluestone.com</a>. Any link with this attribute will be ignored by most major search engines, they will not spider or index the link (with the exception of Ask.com and Yahoo!). This is very useful when using SEO for Google because any links from your forums or website which aren’t useful or don’t need to be ranked can have the nofollow attribute applied to them. Your About and Contact Us pages, for example, do they really need to be indexed and ranking for keywords? No! By applying nofollow to links which don’t matter as much, Google gives more weight to links which do follow.

For example, if your main page is PR 6 and you have 10 links from that page, each one, as an example, might be worth 0.6 PR (PR 6 / 10 Links = 0.6). If you deem that 5 of those links don’t need to be indexed and apply nofollow, each of your links then becomes worth 1.2 PR each (Pr 6 / 5 Links = 1.2). This is a simplified example and it doesn’t work quite like this in real life, but using the simple nofollow tag you can give a bit of extra worth to links you like and take value away from those you dont.

When looked at from a Forum perspective, there are many links on every page which are useless. The Login and Register links for example, are worthless. So too are the FAQ & Search links, and many more. If you display a list of users who are online or who recently registered, you can sometimes have tens or even hundreds of worthless links which are all getting juice from your forum index. Apply nofollow to these and you greatly increase the worth of your topic and other links on the index.

If you have a look around your forums, being sure to log out (since this is how Search Engines see your forum) I’m sure you can find plenty of unnecessary links which could be nofollow.

NoDoFollow – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5687 – Is a plugin for Firefox which highlights nofollow links and allows you to see at a glance your link distribution on any page.

3. Titles & Meta Data

As standard most of the major forum packages don’t include META data for your threads and topics. While Meta Data isn’t as important as it used to be, many of the top search engines still use it. Yahoo! still pays attention to meta keywords, though doesn’t give it much data, and most search engines use meta description to display some information about a page in their search results. By placing the first few sentences of the thread in the description you give just a little more SEO.

By contrast they include too much information in the title tag, usually in the format of Forum Name – View Topic – Thread Title. This is a waste and clogs up the title which should ideally be 8 to 10 words long. Google in specific, loves the title tag. It’s the single most important on page factor for any page. Instead, have the title of the thread as the only item in the title tag. If you really want your forum or site name in there too, add it after the thread name like Thread Title – SiteName.com. This means that the thread title and topic is the most important thing for the search spiders and it’s more likely to rank well.

4. Use Header tags and Sort Out Your Layout

Most forum packages have terrible layouts as far as SEO is concerned. Usually the title will be standard text half way down the fold, after all the login options and other links. By making some minor changes like putting the title in an <h1> tag, moving the majority of the login options and other links to after the page, and pushing the avatar and user details to the right hand side, you greatly increase the on page SEO factors and value of the information on the page. Take out some of the unneeded data like the date of each reply, large quantities of user data, plethoras of image links, etc, and give back some value to the thread text itself.

5. Duplicate Links & Supplemental Pages

This is a very common problem with almost all forum software and stretches accross the board. The problem arises when you have two different links to the same thread or topic. For example one link from a topic might be http://www.seanbluestone.com/forum/index.php?t=7&thread=3422 while the ‘Most recent thread in this topic’ link might be http://www.seanbluestone.com/forum/index.php?topic=7&recent=3422 and the ‘Next Thread’ link from another thread might be http://www.seanbluestone.com/forum/index.php?topic=7&next=3422. These are 3 different links to the same page, yet search engines see them as 3 different pages with the same information. As a result all 3 may be placed in the supplemental index and not displayed. Solving this problem could be as simple as adding a few nofollow links.

Another problem is where two threads have the same title. This can happen alot in larger forums and causes problems in many search engines. It means that if 5 people start a thread on ‘How To Add AdSense To Your Forums’ then only 1 will be displayed on Google while the other 4 are seen as duplicate content. Solving this problem could be as simple as adding the date or page to the title.

VBSEO – http://www.vbseo.com – is an SEO package for vBulletin which offers solutions to the duplicate link problem as well as many other excellent features. It’s costly, at $150, but a worth while investment for the serious webmaster.

6. Offer RSS feeds and Social Bookmark links

With most mobile phones now offering web access and the vast array of hand held devices like palm pilots, RSS is becoming ever more commonplace. Several RSS search engines and directories exist and a whole industry revolves around it. Creating an RSS feed is extremely simple and plugins to do so exist for all of the major forum softwares. By offering RSS feeds for popular threads and topics you increase your exposure and likelyhood of getting return visitors. Since RSS is light and heavy server load is unlikely, you can safely offer RSS feeds for every thread on your forums by supplying a button at the top or bottom of each thread.

Similarly Social Bookmarking has exploded in recent years and is now one of the best methods for getting traffic. Again, all you need is a simple plugin and you can offer a button or series of buttons at the bottom of each thread to allow users to add the thread to popular Social Bookmark sites.

ShareThis – http://www.sharethis.com/getbutton – is a useful, free service that allows you to place a button anywhere on your site which lets your readers add you to their favorite Social Bookmark site.

Most forum packages have a section on their site for mods or plugins and a quick search will offer you solutions to most of the problems above. Usually getting your forums up to scratch on SEO only takes a matter of minutes and doing so will have huge repercussions in the long run. Take 5 minutes out of your schedule and give your forums a new lease of life.

You can discuss this article and see what others are saying about it in the SEO Discussion Forum
Did you find this article useful? Why not buy Sean a coffee?