The Perils of Forums
Posted by admin on June, 30th 2010
Forums can be an amazing source of traffic whether it be a forum about saving money or a forum about drift cars. These two examples get many thousands of people discussing subjects and things they are passionate about which means the site has many repeat visitors and can make a lot of money from advertising.
Forums can also be a curse on a website when members start chatting about un-related subjects. Too much chitter-chatter on the latest news or gossip starts mixing up the subject matter on a forum, if the forum’s main subject was “fishing” and all people talked about was the latest World Cup news then the forum is neither fully fishing related or fully football related and this will damage SEO.
If you’re whole website is based on one subject then it’ll rank well for that subject, if it’s based on two or more unrelated subjects then it’ll rank badly for each one
So how can you get around this potential nightmare, you cannot ban your forum users from talking rubbish!?
The answer is to put your forum on a subdomain such as http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com instead of within a folder such as http://www.driftworks.com/forum/. A subdomain (the part before the domain name) is considered as a completely different website to search engines so it’s a perfect place to put un-related content. Subdomains are used on large sites for different languages, mail servers and apps, make sure to use one on your forum but NOT on your blog, that should be all about your main niche and will help your SEO effort no end.
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