Advanced: SEO best practice for a large forum to minimise risk...?
-
Hi
Hope someone can offer some insight here. We have a site with an active forum. The transactional side of the site is about 300 pages totals, and the forum is well over 100,000 (and growing daily) meaning the 'important' pages account for less that 0.5% of all pages on the site.
Rankings are pretty good and we're ticking lots of boxes with the main site, with good natural links, logical architecture, appropriate keyword targeting.
I'm worried about the following:
- crawl budget
- PR flow
- Panda
We actively moderate the forum for spam and generally the content is good (for a forum anyway), so I'm just looking for any best practice tips for minimising risk. I've contemplated moving the forum to a subdomain so there's that separation, or even noindexing the forum completely, although it does pull in traffic.
Has anyone been in a similar situation?
Thanks!
-
Hi Seomvi - yes, definitely a challenging problem, especially since you're thinking preventative rather than reactive (which is very wise!).
My advice would be to consider creating some form of threshold for forum content before you expose it to Google. For example, you could have a litmus test that says, if a forum thread has <500 words or fewer than 2 unique replies, apply a META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW" to the page header. In that fashion, you keep algorithms like Panda from perceiving your forum as having lots of thin content/low value pages.
For PR flow and crawl budget, I'd generally worry less. Google's gotten very adept at identifying forums, crawling them effectively, and understanding how to handle that type of content/link structure. That said, you might try using rel=prev/next to help with Google's crawling.
Wish you all the best!
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
-
Webjaguar SEO shortcomings
Hey All. I have a client whose ecommerce site is build in Webjaguar. Does anyone have experience with this platform. It appears to be loaded with technical SEO challenges (duplicate content, weird URLs, etc). Interestingly, when I Google "webjaguar SEO challenges" and things like that....nothing comes up. Suspicious, methinks. I appreciate any thoughts from SEO folks. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JBMediaGroup0 -
SEO suggestions for a directory
Hi all, I am new to SEO. I work for a ratings and review website, like TripAdvisor and LinkedIn. How would one go about setting up SEO strategy for national directories that have local suggested pages? What can be a good practice. For example, Tripadvisor has many different restaurants across the UK. What would they do to improve their SEO? How do they target correct links? How do they go about building their Moz Score? Would really appreciate your thoughts and suggestions. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_S
Eric0 -
What is the best SEO way for a shop
Hi there ! A client want to sell some products on its future website but just a small range (the most part of this website will not be an online shop). The idea is to add a "shop" button in the menu to redirect clients in this shop. I would like your opinion about how should I construct this shop, what do you think is the best for SEO : "www.website.com/shop" or "shop.website.com" thank you in advance for your answers !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnjinFrance0 -
Best practices for structuring an ecommerce site
I'm revamping my wife's ecommerce site. It is currently a very low traffic website that is not indexed very well in Google. So, my plan is to restructure it based upon the best practices that helps me avoid duplicate content penalties, and easier to index strategies. The store has about 7 types of products. Each product has approximately 30 different size variations that are sometimes specifically searched for. For example: 20x10x1 air filters, 20x10x2 air filters, 20x10x1 allergy reducing air filters, etc So, is it best for me to create 7 different products with 30 different size variations (size selector at the product level that changes the price) or is it better to create 210 different product pages, one for each style/size?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pherbio0 -
Domain Forwarding for SEO
Hey guys, I recently created a new website for a client who was ranking #1 for the term "jupiter obgyn" but they have now dropped down to #4. This happened because their old home page was at www. instead of just jupiterobgyn.com. When you type in the www. version, it does take you to the root domain but it's not carrying the old PA! The www. version of the page had a 22 PA and the new root domain hosted page is a 1. How can I fix it so that "link juice" carries over? Is this something i need to do in 1and1 (their web host) or within Wordpress? Thanks!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
SEO issues with Magento
Hi Everyone, We use Magento CMS for our site and we are having a frustrating time resolving our SEO issues. The site was very poorly managed in years past and in the past year I have redesigned and cleaned up many things. However we are recently having trouble with indexing and keyword ranking. Issue #1: Our main keyword ranking has dropped quite a bit while our other less important keywords have steadily risen. I suspect a very strict robots.txt implemented back in early January may have been the culprit. We have since been modifying it with out much luck. Many of our pages are still blocked. 12/05/12 : ranked 12th 1/09/13: ranked 19th 1/16/13: ranked 35th Now: out of top 50 (52nd) Issue #2: Not a single image is being indexed. We are 0 for 582 according to Webmaster tools. Not sure why... Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated as I have great determination and interest in learning the correct way to fix/do this. Site: www.scojo.com Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | t_parrish0 -
SEO Tools
Anyone have any experience and thoughts about the woo rank website and seo tool?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4341 -
What are the best suites of SEO tools?
I normally use SEOmoz and a bit of SEMrush but I dont really know much outside of those two. Im looking to do a review of the big, trustworthy ones - along the lines of free trial price vs value ranktracking linkbuilding help onpage analysis and help competitor analysis reports I heard good things about Raven Tools and Web CEO. Ive seen mention of SEOpowersuite on this forum but the site looks spammy as hell Anyone have a view on those 5 tools or any others in a similar vein? Or any other top line criteria I should be looking at? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | firstconversion
Stephen1