How much do discussion forums help seo?

Social Media
1

I am considering putting phpbb forums on my site, and am curious to know how much of a factor they are in seo? I would imagine that search engines love them because of the volume of content, but I don’t know. Does anyone have knowledge about this they could share?

2

Search engine spiders tend to love forums because they contain a ton of text and lots of links. That being said, it’s not going to do ANYTHING in terms of SEO for the rest of your website as it relates to search engine results.

Your forum pages may pick up some good rankings if they have decent content and are relevant to a specific search of a user. Those rankings aren’t going to flow back to your main page, well not enough to make a difference.

That being said, a forum could be a great way to engage your users and will greatly improve your SEO in terms of real human users. Let’s take SitePoint for example. I come here for the forums and would probably never visit the other areas of SitePoint had I not already come here for the forums. This website has been very well optimized in terms of users because it makes integrates the forums and the rest of the website content very well.

So you shouldn’t be installing a forum section of your website to improve your rankings but you should be installing a forum to improve your user experience.

3

i think you must makes forum signatures with backlink for help seo…
but, before makes forum signature you must follow the rules…
and don’t forget to choice dofollow forum submission, because it’s can help to increase traffic website …

Thanks

4

next to nothing :slight_smile:

however, a forum is a ~great~ idea, because of the added traffic to your site that it would bring

5

Thanks to you both for your generous advice. It’s much appreciated.:):slight_smile:

6

By participating in forums you get two type of advantages

  1. As everybody said you can get back-links and traffic from your signatures

  2. You get excellent knowledge of other things as you crawl through different types of threads.

    Goodluck!!!

7

I think it’s an awesome move.

I’ve done it with a lot of my websites, one you might of seen is namc.us

I ended up selling that site, but it helped out tremendously in traffic. Especially if you can make the urls static with keywords. I don’t know how well phpbb rewrite mod works, but a regular forum is a good thing and there’s nothing bad about it.

I mean more content means more traffic, just look at sitepoint. They have a blog as frontpage, forums on the side, and a marketplace.

8

discussion forums give chance users to return on ur site

9

Good idea. It can brings traffic to your site.

10

By participating in forums one can increase knowledge as well as get back links for the site with back link facility.

11

ya i have some knowledge about forum if u want to create a forum to ur site related its a very bad thing for u. there are two type of forum do follow and non follow. In do follow forum that provide a signature or link facility and non follow forum u can not provide that type facility. Do follow forum is not useful for ur website.

12

Use signature instead of posting links (unless it’s really relevant). Do not spam, just try to help others.

13

SEO is an ongoing process and you always need to learn new things, forums are best way to do that, I think this thing help more then signature link

14

Yep, Of course they do bring traffic to your site but, keeping a Forum on your site means making the crawler visit the site for many more times, due to the modification in content.

15

I had a forum on my page at one time, and the moderation of said forum took up too much time.

16

JeffWalden got it right. The forums will not necessarily directly improve the SEO for your whole site BUT with a thriving community you will build up your brand awareness. If you are successful in that endeavor the total value for your site may increase over the long term.

Similarly surgeryhouston made a good point that the time involved in running a good forum may out weigh the total investment. This comes down to opportunity cost. If you’re concerned about SEO is the time involved in setting up and running a forum worth more than some other activity you could be doing?

17

Generally forums are for helping people, and once you get some reputation and a number of posts, you can use a signature on your posts. This will help driving traffic.

18

You’re right that search engines love forums because of the number of links and the type of content. Just keep in mind that your forum pages will rank, but that’s not going to help the rest of your site.

The original question was related to boosting the overall site with the help of a forum. A forum will make the forum pages rank.