Forum on a Sub-domain - Thin Content?
-
I have wordpress blog installed on my Domain and now I intent to start a Forum.
I understand that the content on the forum would be thin-content which may attract Google Penalties. So, would it be wise to start the forum on a sub-domain to avoid any penalty.
My query is:-
1. If the content on the sub-domain is thin, can it impact my main domain as well.
2. Should I install the forum on a sub-domain or an entirely different domain so as to avoid any penalty? My preference is a sub-domain provided google does not levy any penalty
I also intent to display RSS Feeds of the Forum on the Home Page of the Website.
-
hmmm.... Thanks for your inputs...
-
Well, as I said, open the forum up to Google, but no-one can give a cast-iron guarantee that there will be no impact to the main from Google. It's unlikely to cause issues, but that is as much of a guarantee as I could give.
-Andy
-
I'm an Accountant and focus on Tax related issues.
There are some things which we cant write on our blogs but we can always discuss it with our colleagues and clients. Such things are being searched for on Google but no-one can vouch for it on our blog. For such things, people come to forums through Google..
-
Well, Google is recognising a subdomain as part of a TLD now, so I couldn't give any guarantees of what could happen here, even though my suspicions are that it would be absolutely fine.
Can I ask why you don't wish to noindex the forum if you are already concerned about thin content?
-Andy
-
Thanks Andy for the prompt response
However, I would prefer not to noindex the forum.
-
Rather than worry about thin / lack of content, just noindex the forum itself in the robots.txt file by disallowing access to it. You can then host it happily on your main site without having to look at a subdomain.
If you prefer it on a subdomain, just do the same thing here.
It would look like this:
Disallow: /forum/-Andy
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
'domain:example.com/' is this line with a '/' at the end of the domain valid in a disavow report file ?
Hi everyone Just out of curiosity, what would happen if in my disavow report I have this line : domain:example.com**/** instead of domain:example.com as recommended by google. I was just wondering if adding a / at the end of a domain would automatically render the line invalid and ignored by Google's disavow backlinks tool. Many thanks for your thoughts
Technical SEO | | LabeliumUSA0 -
Domain vs Sub Domain and Rankings
Hi All Wanting some advice. I have a client which has a number of individual centres that are part of an umbrella organisation. Each individual centre has its own web site and some of these sites have similar (not duplicate content) products and services. Currently the individual centres are sub domains of the umbrella organisation. i.e. Umbrella organisation www.organisation.org.au Individual centres are sub domains i.e. www.centre1.organisation.org.au, www.centre2.organisation.org.au etc. I'm feeling that perhaps this setup might be affecting the rankings of the individual sites because they are sub domains. Would love to hear some thoughts or experience on this and whether its worth going through the process of migrating the individual centre domains. Thanks Ian
Technical SEO | | iragless0 -
Keyword in Domain Name
Hello!My website is www.enchantingquotes.com. I also own the domain www.enchantingwallquotes.com,which forwards to my site. About 90% of my business comes from the keyword "wall quotes". Should I consider changing switching to the enchantingwallquotes.com domain and redirecting? And if I do, do I need to recreate the entire website or is there an easier way that I am overlooking? Thank you for any advise/insight!
Technical SEO | | eqgirl0 -
Medium sizes forum with 1000's of thin content gallery pages. Disallow or noindex?
I have a forum at http://www.onedirection.net/forums/ which contains a gallery with 1000's of very thin-content pages. We've currently got these photo pages disallowed from the main googlebot via robots.txt, but we do all the Google images crawler access. Now I've been reading that we shouldn't really use disallow, and instead should add a noindex tag on the page itself. It's a little awkward to edit the source of the gallery pages (and keeping any amends the next time the forum software gets updated). Whats the best way of handling this? Chris.
Technical SEO | | PixelKicks0 -
Duplicate Content
SEOmoz is reporting duplicate content for 2000 of my pages. For example, these are reported as duplicate content: http://curatorseye.com/Name=“Holster-Atlas”---Used-by-British-Officers-in-the-Revolution&Item=4158
Technical SEO | | jplill
http://curatorseye.com/Name=âHolster-Atlasâ---Used-by-British-Officers-in-the-Revolution&Item=4158 The actual link on the site is http://www.curatorseye.com/Name=“Holster-Atlas”---Used-by-British-Officers-in-the-Revolution&Item=4158 Any insight on how to fix this? I'm not sure where the second version of the URL is coming from. Thanks,
Janet0 -
Would this be considered "thin content?"
I share a lot of images via twitter and over the last year I've used several different tools to do this; mainly twitpic, and now instagram. Last year I wanted to try to find a way to host those images on my site so I could get the viewers of the picture back to my site instead a 3rd party (twitpic, etc.) I found a few plugins that worked "sort of" well, and so I used that for a while. (I have since stopped doing that in favor of using instagram.) But my question is do all of these image posts hurt my site you think? I had all of these images under a category called "twitter" but have since moved them to an uncategorized category until I figure out what I want to do with them. I wanted to see if anyone could chime in and give me some advice. Since the posts are just images with no content (other than the image) and the title isn't really "optimized" for anything do these posts do me more harm than good. Do I delete them all? Leave them as is? Or do something else? Also in hindsight I'm assuming this was a bad idea since the bounce rate for people clicking on a link just to see an image was probably very high, and may have caused the opposite result of what I was looking for. If I knew than what I know now I would have tracked the bounce rate of those links, how many people who viewed one of those images actually went to another page on the site, etc. But hindsight's 20/20. 🙂
Technical SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
New domain
Hi, I have a domain with no keywords on it, and I´ve been using it for years. Now I bought another domain with the keyword on it. I whant to work on seo for the second domain, with the keyword. What is the better way to work this out? 301? Duplicate de site? redirect in another way?
Technical SEO | | mgfarte0 -
Duplicate content domains ranking successfully
I have a project with 8 domains and each domain is showing the same content (including site structure) and still all sites do rank. When I search for a specific word-string in google it lists me all 8 domains. Do you have an explanation, why Google doesn't filter those URLs to just one URL instead of 8 with the same content?
Technical SEO | | kenbrother0
