Topic: Forum SEO is a myth

[Kindred]

I think you read the title, but never bothered to read the post or the conversation.

[MESWEB]

So You gonna tell me - Title and description are two different things? This is look like talking about programming HTML inside of topic PHP title.

[Kindred]

no - I am going to tell you that the contents and discussion of the thread explain what is actually meant by the title - the same as any newspaper article.

You appear to have made some assumptions based solely on MISreading the title of the thread...
(and I believe you have just proven my point)

(oh, and yes... as far as "SEO" is concerned, title and description as different things)

[MESWEB]

MISreading the title of the thread?? Are you serious? So what means "Forum SEO is a myth" for You?
Answer is simple - somebody wants prove the SEO forum is a bull....t. That's strange for me like Pretty Url does not  help. Lol. So if Pretty url don't helping so how You can explain this:
Look to attachment and You will see keyword in url "forum" and google found this keyword in url. So if someone think urls don't matters then he should hit own head to the wall hard as he can.

[Kindred]

Once again... You seem to have no idea what was actually said in the thread and are basing your statements off of only the title.

And the title is completely correct.

FORUM seo is a myth. Which is not to say that you can't make some enhancements to improve the way search engines rank your site...   But the concept of optimizing your DYNAMIC forum is basically, silly...

And regardless of what you want to claim, Prettyurls have little, if any, benefit to forums -- or to any site, for that matter. Google does not base rank on the URL structure any more... That comment is about a decade out of date... Just like the use of the "keywords" metatag

[Phphelp]

The Keyword thing is really based on search engine.

Google has been giving less and less emphasis on keywords in the URL..

If you watch the video in this link by "Matt Cutts" (Head of google webspam team) and read the information on tests done at the bottom, you will see it does play a role..

http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/search-engine-friendly-urls/

With that being said, (Bing/Yahoo) gives a much stronger ranking to keywords in the URL. I have done tests myself, just by renaming a page from <domain>/<not searched for keyword> to <domain>/<new keyword> and doing a 301 redirect and then that page finally ranks for that keyword.

Bing/yahoo also places a much stronger weight on EMD (Exact match domain) - A few months ago, bought a EMD fresh - just a single page site and wham it's in the top 5 for the match. But can't even be found on google.

Another thing I recently learned, in Google, if you have "nofollow" links on your site, you're just leaking page rank.  The other links don't get more juice, google takes the total number of links say 10 then gives each one 1 point of juice.  if 5 of those 10 are nofollow, then the remaining 5 still just get 1 point of juice. But if you remove the 5 nofollow links then the remaining 5 links get 2 pts of juice each. I'm a little old school and didn't realize google made a change to how nofollow works.

So having nofollow/dofollow links on your forum doesn't help your SEO ranking, just cripples the passing of page rank to the nofollow links. Nofollow to google means (you don't trust the source of the link). But it also reduces the amount people will spam links, since they receive no benefit. Internal no follow links (just hurt you) - Matt Cutts says you shouldn't do that.

Not allowing links - that will help SEO - since all the juice will be passed solely to your internal links.
 
Everyone has their own opinions on what matters and don't matter - But for me I think pretty URLs play a role (bing/yahoo) and to a lesser extent in (google). They key take away, is that it's not a negative.
 

[bendigital]

To say that pretty URLs (or SEF URLs) don't help SEO at all is an extreme.

I believe pretty URLs do help SEO, though not significantly. My source is from the Google itself: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76329?hl=en [nofollow]

But to have keywords inside URLs is no use. Make your URLs as neat as possible (it's still okay if you can't since it's not significant), but to put keywords inside the URLs for the sake of SEO is not necessary. Google is smart, it knows what your page is about though you don't put keywords in URLs.

[Gwenwyfar]

Yeah, google is very smart. It seems to think the majority of keywords on my forum are "messages", "message", "topic", "date" and other irrelevant crap, and what's actually on the post content and keywords meta doesn't even come around 

Well... at least it ignores the footer and menus!

[landyvlad]

A very interesting article thank you.
How often would spiders generally be crawling any given forum?
If a site goes offline for a few days is that going to crash it down the search page rankings?

Just wondering because I have a forum with a similar name (and same subject matter) as another forum.  We'll call the latter the "old" forum.

The 'old' forum was ranked higher than mine - and fair enough - it is /was much larger, has been going for many years and had a lot of content. I use the past tense because that 'old' forum has been offline for a couple of days now and frankly it's not clear whether it will ever be back.  But it's down for now at least.

So will this result in a rapid demotion of the links to that 'old' forum, or just a slow decline over time?

Thanks

[青山 素子]

How often would spiders generally be crawling any given forum?

At least traditionally, it depended on both the internal ranking of the site and how often there is fresh content. Those two factors have had the most effect on how often a site is crawled.

If a site goes offline for a few days is that going to crash it down the search page rankings?

Probably not, unless it was particularly high volume and had a lot of churn on content.

So will this result in a rapid demotion of the links to that 'old' forum, or just a slow decline over time?

Most likely a slow decline at first but speeding up over time as it continues to remain offline.

[landyvlad]

Thank you.

[rajanmahajan]

Hi.... Arantor.....Your ideas are very interesting and Captivating. You have given some very solid points about the mythology of trying to search engine optimize forum. Can you please tell me that why a new website with low PA DA can rank high against a website that is much older having high PA DA?

[Arantor]

The algorithm is skewing away from established and towards new things in the ever-growing quest for new. Even though in the case of Domain Authority it should be completely the opposite.

Further proof that Google et al's logic is broken when it comes down to UGC.

[Gwenwyfar]

This explains all the blog and news-like crap that has been dominating many google searches. I've started jumping on to page 5~10 on more scientific searches and the results have been much better, usually loads of old sites with a lot of info.

And then there's the region blocks for results that apparently never show up in any page...

[Vanilla Lumina]

I have to agree, forum SEO is a myth since you cannot control the content solely and it is mostly focused on discussion rather than just content.

Plus, Google personalises search results tailored to match a person's need, so in general SEO is a myth!

[salenaadam]

These are the most common SEO myths :-

1. Meta titles and description
2. Quality Content
3. Link building is dead
4. On-page SEO
5. Keyword density

[Arantor]

I love how this topic keeps drawing spammers.

[drewactual]

so instead of starting a new thread....

curious thing:  One of the most active boards on my flagship site's is listed on Googles first page, usually a few spots down the list, but not even half way... which is good.  the curiosity is the description says something to the affect "No information provided about this page". 

weird... it climbed well, ranking with the heavyweights of the field, but... without a description? 

^that attests to what has been said in this thread and inline with the founding post. 

but......




so at the first of the year i was ranked in the 30's for 12month average... and i reinstalled PrettyURL's.  briefly: i realize PrettyURL's doesn't matter to a computer... but what and where it DOES matter? Human eyes- when someone reads the URL and understands where it's going to take them it establishes trust, however fleeting that is in this interweb thing.. I read that somewhere, and i've come to subscribe to it....  Using social media as a trampoline, i've ran my own little experiments.  two threads, four URL's- i ran one with pic's and descriptions and with PrettyURL's, and the other the same but with dynamic call... then, on the other social site i did the same thing, but using PrettyURL's on the other thread... guess which one's secured more attention?  This was repeated several times and to similar results.  enough about this...

PrettyURL's, didn't kill my rankings, but something did.  I took that opportunity to reintroduce them, and they dipped further.  They were in the mid-fifties in March/April. 

So I went through and tagged... like mad... each thread's title is an h2, and each threads excerpt is an h3 on board index.  On display.php, each thread (page) title is an h1, and each post is an h3.. i left h2's if someone titled their response.

this brought me back into reason ranking-wise ... - the mid thirties overall over last 3 months. (yeah, i collapsed the range to better grasp what was happening)... the tags worked as this is all that changed. 

but back to this issue with the "No information provided about this page" message... the meta's are set right and formed decently.  the tags ought to do something about that, right? 

well.... I plateaued in the low 20's for a spell, and decided it was time to do something else. 

right now I'm at 13 overall... I'm guessing there is a pretty good delta between 13 and 12.9 as everything has improved (other google metrics) except the overall rank... so... I figured why not try something else in addition to the prior efforts. 

I wrote a simple isset php (that i use in various places on the page) and to include a display:hidden block that is basically a paragraph starting with a concise H1, then a descriptive less than 60 word H2, and followed with an H3 going into details... this changes with each board, along with other cosmetic stuff such as header image, sidebar block image, and so on... it's the very first thing after opening the body....

the prior manner was a hard coded block- with overall site H1, H2, and H3... now, it's specific to the board. 

i'm waiting to see if there are any improvements as a result...

by the way, the issue with 'no information provided about this page' was noindex related- and it's been fixed.  so.. if that impacts it will skew whatever results i anticipate with the H1-via-isset thing...

so.. all of that^ to suggest that SEO is perhaps a fools errand as agreed to here, but in my opinion there is not a thing wrong with forming a page to suit what the 'great and powerful google' deems fit.  PrettyURL's isn't about google or SEO, it's about reaching people, which differs greatly in my opinion...  the h tags seem to be google's flavor, currently, along with responsive design (mobile friendly) and canonical URL's.  I'm thinking there is no 'gaming the game', and the most convincing factor that destroys that myth is 'google can change their weights whenever, however, and render someone gaming the game obsolete' in a matter of hours if they choose..... (it's not that they would 'choose' on the premise of 'catching' people gaming the game, it's that they simply found a better way to do what they do which those focused on 'tricks' will be caught flatfooted when the shift happens)...

i'm not sold in sitemaps making a difference- not a huge one- but... the 'publisher' side of my flagship site led the ranks until i asked google nicely, via sitemap, to "take a look over here in the forum?".. then threads started showing up (as tracked by referrals/analytics) in rankings.... the h tags just about 'had' to have assisted greatly there. 

I'm typing this as i wait for a sitemap to generate... 40k+ pages entered into the sitemap, and broken down into different 'looks'... i don't know that is helps... but it'll be there if it does. 

i just semi-retired late last May... this website campaign will hopefully generate a supplemental income for me adding to my savings.. so... it is important to me to try to generate something folks will enjoy- but they have to find it first.  i've got a good crowd right now, but more is almost always better in this 'game'... all that said, i ain't paying nobody to do something "improve your SEO!!!" when it truly comes down to, in my opinion, is simply being staged and presented correctly for the engines to parse.  THAT is SEO by my reckoning...       

end rant