SEO For Forum Site

[softwaredevelopersuk]

Does anyone have idea of forum site seo. In Normal, Forum sites have lot of external links with do follow attribute. So how Google will consider forum sites for optimization???

 

[OldWelshGuy]

what software is it? there are many plugins that will optimise your site, it is mainly about meta data mainly the titles.

 

[nitro23456]

Technically speaking they dont have a do-follow attribute because that doesnt exist. However, they may not have no follow.

 

[chrismartin4u]

Technically speaking they dont have a do-follow attribute because that doesn't exist. However, they may not have no follow.

I agree. there is no do-follow tag available. It's just the absence of nofollow tag.

 

[I, Brian]

vbseo has long been used by a lot of vbulletin webmasters for optimising that software - not least to prevent duplicate content and links.

Each software platform has different options, though.

 

[victorm]

There are several SEO mods available for phpBB as well, although from memory quite unpleasant to rollback if needed (the ones changing the URLs to SEO-friendly were a bit of a pain, but that was some time ago, convinced things got better); important for page titles/description and removing duplicate content, mostly (session ids in URLs etc).

Also check internal pagination - make sure crawlers see very long threads until the end - and play with page length (no of posts) depending on how chatty your users are - if one liners, make 25+ / page before URL changes to show some meat to SEs.

I'd suggest you worry more about moderation and getting good posters to contribute frequently. Make social sharing easy, and look for gamification mods (badges, ranks, thanks, egg hunts etc).

If you have time, try to work on Google Trends - bring trending topics related to your forum in fresh threads, but don't ease the moderation - if you ride a good wave you'll get a lot of social engineers trying to divert traffic to their own sites from a lively thread.