Pros and Cons of a Single Page Forum Thread
-
Let's say I have a thread located at mysite.com/how-to-do-xyz and that thread has 75 posts. Let's further assume that the average post is well written and about 3-4 sentences long. For SEO purposes, do you think it would make sense to display all posts on a single page, or spread them out over 3-4 pages?
Assuming I set it up for a single page, does this have any negative impact on the rare thread that is 500+ posts long?
I had always thought about doing it on a single page, but then designed my forum the multi page way because that's what everyone else does. Yet, I see that SEOmoz does it the single page way, so maybe there is some validity to that.
Thanks much.
-
This could turn into merely a debate of opinion. For example, in my opinion, multiple pages are more user-friendly. My advice would be to find some research data that indicates which format is more preferred by the majority of users and do it that way. User experience before search engines always.
-
The only seo value I could see between using 1 page vs many is if you allow do follow links in your commenting. this would allow links to carry a higher page rank instead of the comments on page one having a higher value than later links.
now for users, I personally tend to read more comments and get more involved when there is only 1 page regardless of how long. everything on 1 page makes it easy to read individual comments without searching through pages and i think to some extent it is phycologicallye more enticing to post on when you see a long list of coments.
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
-
Glossary Page - best practice
Hi guys, We have a glossary on our website. All terms are accessible via a 'view all' URL, however we also have each letter on their own URL, e.g /a. Currently the rel=canonical tag for all the individual letter pages points to the view all URL. I'm just wondering whether that is best practice or not, as currently not all the individual letter pages are being indexed. Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | brian-madden0 -
Wrong page title in Google
Hi there, A while ago we took over the domain www.hoesjes.nl and forwarded it to our website www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl. If you perform a search for the keyword 'hoesjes' in Google then we (www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl) show up on an organic number 1 position. The problem is that the page title isn't correct. Google shows the page title of the website hoesjes.nl we took over and (correctly?) redirected to our domain www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl. Does anybody have any idea how to get rid of this wrong page title in Google?
Technical SEO | | MarcelMoz
Here you can find a screenshot of what I mean. Thanks! Marcel0 -
New Page Showing Up On My Reports w/o Page Title, Words, etc - However, I didn't create it
I have a WordPress site and I was doing a crawl for errors and it is now showing up as of today that this page : https://thinkbiglearnsmart.com/event-registration/?event_id=551&name_of_event=HTML5 CSS3 is new and has no page title, words, etc. I am not even sure where this page or URL came from. I was messing with the robots.txt file to allow some /category/ posts that were being hidden, but I didn't re-allow anything with the above appendages. I just want to make sure that I didn't screw something up that is now going to impact my rankings - this was just a really odd message to come up as I didn't create this page recently - and that shouldnt even be a page accessible to the public. When I edit the page - it is using an Event Espresso (WordPress plugin) shortcode - and I don't want to noindex this page as it is all of my events. Sorry this post is confusing, any help or insight would be appreciated! I am also interested in hiring someone for some hourly consulting work on SEO type issues if anyone has any references. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | webbmason0 -
Seo For Forum Sites
I have forum site.I've opened it 2 months ago.But there is a problem.Therefore my content is unique , my site's keyword ranking constantly changing..Sometimes my site's ranking drops from first 500.After came to 70s. I didn't make any off page seo to my site.What is the problem ?
Technical SEO | | tutarmi0 -
From page 1th to page 18th @ Google
Hello Mozzers! I have a question, you may help.. How may it be possible that a page ranking well (1th result) goes from 1th result to the 18th page just in 1 day? It doesnt seem to be any kind of penalization.. I now had all suspicious outgoing links to be nofollow (they were not before), this may be a cause .. (?) Do you have any other suggestion? Thanks
Technical SEO | | socialengaged0 -
Duplicate Page Content Report
In Crawl Diagnostics Summary, I have 2000 duplicate page content. When I click the link, my Wordpress return "page not found" and I see it's not indexed by Google, and I could not find the issue in Google Webmaster. So where does this link come from?
Technical SEO | | smallwebsite0 -
Viral page not ranking onGoogle
A user generated talk thread on our social networking site went viral yesterday and generated around 36000 extra visits. But, when we Google the key phrase in this thread our site is not even in the Top 50. Instead the pages are dominated by other (lesser) websites referring to the content and linking to the thread The page is indexed The on page SEO grade for the key phrase and variant according to SEOMoz is A Our home page has a PR of 7 and an SEO Domain Authority of 76 We are the original source of this content Other talk threads on different subjects in a similar category are ranking on page 1 of Google. What's happening?
Technical SEO | | CecilyP0 -
Dealing with 404 pages
I built a blog on my root domain while I worked on another part of the site at .....co.uk/alpha I was really careful not to have any links go to alpha - but it seems google found and indexed it. The problem is that part of alpha was a copy of the blog - so now soon we have a lot of duplicate content. The /alpha part is now ready to be taken over to the root domain, the initial plan was to then delete /alpha. But now that its indexed I'm worried that Ill have all these 404 pages. I'm not sure what to do.. I know I can just do a 301 redirect for all those pages to go to the other ones in case a link comes on but I need to delete those pages as the server is already very slow. Or does a 301 redirect mean that I don't need those pages anymore? Will those pages still get indexed by google as separate pages? Please assist.
Technical SEO | | borderbound0