Integrating Forum for SEO???

I am currently considering integrating a forum on my site.. I see the great benefits with fresh user generated content and growing the number of pages on my site by allowing other to chat and increasing traffic. Its fantastic BUT...

If I allow them to use links either in posts or their sigs, then this could result in a huge amount of outgoing links from my site (many SPAM), which I believe can be negative for SEO so not sure I want to risk it.

An idea might be to disallow linking which is easy using most of the forum engines... but then I hate forums that dont allow me to link back to my site!

Does anyone have experience of this or opinions?

a forum is a tool for great exchanges; ideas, resources, reviews, links. If you hate the idea of giving out links to randomly anyone, then don't put up a forum. However, if you believe that this could really help your site boost its ranking and elevate its popularity online, but you hate spam, then I guess what you need next is a moderator to keep the forum clean. Spam messages are always there, you can't avoid it especially if you put your forum for public consumption. You can only moderate responses and freeze accounts that don't follow rules. Moreover, you can also set sig links to nofollow, besides if the members are mainly interested to building relationships, gaining and giving knowledge, they would care less of getting a followed link everytime they put forward their responses.

Hi Alexcruncha!

Never ran a forum personally, although proffess to joining a few just for a link in my early SEO days :)

Regardless of the spamming issues that will most likely happen at some point, a forum will provide you with great content and the chance to build a community around your site which could be invaluable when translated into potential earnings.

A few tips to keep the spammers at bay as much as possible however:

• Create a minimum post limit, for example users can add a link after their 10th post. By the time they get round to that you will most likely see their intentions based on their post quality.
• As best.hands mentioned, upgrade loyal members to moderators. They will take it upon themselves to eat the spam for breakfast.
• Be vigilant when it does occur. Spammers often look for spammed places to plant their dirty links as they know it will get through. As soon as you identify a spammer lock their account and block their IP so they can't come back. Most these guys are 'SEO gurus' who may use automated software and come back for more with another client.

I am sure there are a few plugins dependant on which software you go for, the most popular ones will have addressed this issue many times over and make it harder to exploit.

Cheers,
Dave

I think I have made my decision. I definately want a forum and allow links but dont want it to negatively affect my seo so I will mod the forum engine to allow only nofollow links until I promote a user in the forum to lets say a moderator.

Its a win win sitaution... genuine people can link creating a highly usable forum but there will be little benefit for spammmers and I will not be negatively affected for seo rankings.

Good luck Alexcruncha, pop back when it's live so we can check it out!

Integrating your own forum will really help you in generating traffic but it will also help set up a strong community if you get rid of the spam. Good luck on that plan! :wave:

I have run a couple large forums in the past and don't think I would do it again. I found them to be a ton of work, and trying to keep a place active and encourage new people to sign up is a very difficult task at the beginning. If you are still up for the challenge, there are several plugins that you can install (esp with VB) that can help you control this. The best bet is to make users have a certain number of posts before they are allowed to use links (either in their profile or in posts). This way you can tell if someone is just spamming posts to be able to post links and its easier to monitor. Also, I am pretty sure that some of the SEO plugins make all outgoing links nofollowed so it really shouldn't affect you too much, that is if google still even uses nofollow. With all the plugins out there I don't really think its a big issue, the biggest issue is are you sure you want to try and run a forum ;)

A quick update on my findings. I have just been discussing in another post on GPWA regarding the nofollow tag... https://www.gpwa.org/forum/nofollow-...tml#post631837

...well it turns out that the nofollow tag will not stop me losing PR from a lot of external links anymore (well eversince 2008 when Google changed the algorithm). Apparently now it just stops the link juice going to the destination page (making it useless for spammers). Google changed it to stop people sculpting PR on their sites. Anyway the solution is now to only show links in posts and sigs once people are logged into the forum. Hence these links are not visible to search engines. Solved.

Still working on it. I am nearly done, will be back once its live.

Oh, and Hi Graham, I appreciate you sharing your experiences with forums and had not really thought about the amount of work it would take to run TBH. I dont really expect it to get that large but if it does I will be pleased and will cross that bridge of how to manage when I come to it.

<meta http-equiv="CONTENT-TYPE" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><title></title><meta name="GENERATOR" content="OpenOffice.org 3.2 (Win32)"><style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --> </style> Integrating forum on your site is a good idea and allowing only nofollow links is a brilliant one. :cloud9:

After many months I have finally released the forum on the Fantasy Bingo site. Please go and check it out: http://www.fantasybingo.co.uk/forum/

I have allowed users to post links initially (not no-followed) to help seed the site... so if you fancy posting on the forum please be my guest I dont mind you including a backlink to reference your own site provided your posts are not spam.

That's a neat idea to get the forum going - I'll try and swing on over when I have a spare 10.

Ps. I'm guessing you mean sig links, right?

Actually sig links are disabled but normal links in the post are enabled for now.

Full details can be found in the private section of the GPWA forum here: https://www.gpwa.org/forum/pr3-bingo...ht=#post653429

For all of you that tried the forum apologies. I didnt test it before the announcement and there was an issue with the permissions so it basically didnt allow registered users to post.

Anyway it is now fixed and works as it should as of about 5 minutes ago. Please pass by and leave your comments.

The format of forums also allows opportunities for you to obtain valuable back links, list building capabilities, as well as establish you as an authority in your niche. If you invest time and honest effort you can become the "Go To" person in your forum.