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
-
Search Console Indexed Page Count vs Site:Search Operator page count
We launched a new site and Google Search Console is showing 39 pages have been indexed. When I perform a Site:myurl.com search I see over 100 pages that appear to be indexed. Which is correct and why is there a discrepancy? Also, Search Console Page Index count started at 39 pages on 5/21 and has not increased even though we have hundreds of pages to index. But I do see more results each week from Site:psglearning.com My site is https://wwww.psglearning.com
Technical SEO | | pdowling0 -
What should I do with all these 404 pages?
I have a website that Im currently working on that has been fairly dormant for a while and has just been given a face lift and brought back to life. I have some questions below about dealing with 404 pages. In Google WMT/search console there are reports of thousands of 404 pages going back some years. It says there are over 5k in total but I am only able to download 1k or so from WMT it seems. I ran a crawl test with Moz and the report it sent back only had a few hundred 404s in, why is that? Im not sure what to do with all the 404 pages also, I know that both Google and Moz recommend a mixture of leaving some as 404s and redirect others and Id like to know what the community here suggests. The 404s are a mix of the following: Blog posts and articles that have disappeared (some of these have good back-links too) Urls that look like they used to belong to users (the site used to have a forum) which where deleted when the forum was removed, some of them look like they were removed for spam reasons too eg /user/buy-cheap-meds-online and others like that Other urls like this /node/4455 (or some other random number) Im thinking I should permanently redirect the blog posts to the homepage or the blog but Im not sure what to do about all the others? Surely having so many 404s like this is hurting my crawl rate?
Technical SEO | | linklander0 -
Optimizing Forums
Hello Moz Team, I'd like to inquire about our forums section on how to optimize them the best way. So, we started a forums section and our audience likes them very much, we were able to get a few hundred subscribers and it has been very active http://violintutorpro.com/forums/ I created a campaign in Moz Analytics and it came back that we had tons of dupe content, all coming from the tags in the forums. We can remove the tags just so we won't have dupe content, but, how can we use each topic as a content on their own. We currently have a few hundred of dupe content.
Technical SEO | | jac.reyes0 -
Page that appears on SERPs is not the page that has been optimized for users
This may seem like a pretty newbie question, but I haven't been able to find any answers to it (I may not be looking correctly). My site used to rank decently for the KW "Gold name necklace" with this page in the search results:http://www.mynamenecklace.co.uk/Products.aspx?p=302This was the page that I was working on optimizing for user experience (load time, image quality, ease of use, etc.) since this page was were users were getting to via search. A couple months ago the Google SERP's started showing this page for the same query (also ranked a little lower, but not important for this specific question):http://www.mynamenecklace.co.uk/Products.aspx?p=314Which is a white gold version of the necklaces. This is not what most users have in mind (when searching for gold name necklace) so it's much less effective and engaging.How do I tell Google to go back to old page/ give preference to older page / tell them that we have a better version of the page / etc. without having to noindex any of the content? Both of these pages have value and are for different queries, so I can't canonical them to a single page. As far as external links go, more links are pointing to the Yellow gold version and not the white gold one.Any ideas on how to remedy this?Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Don340 -
Duplicate Page Title
Hi I just got back from first crawl report and there were plenty of errors. I know this has been asked before but I am newbie here so bear with me. I captured the video. Any ideas on how to address the issue? ktXKDxRttK
Technical SEO | | mcardenal0 -
Noindex Pages indexed
I'm having problem that gogole is index my search results pages even though i have added the "noindex" metatag. Is the best thing to block the robot from crawling that file using robots.txt?
Technical SEO | | Tedred0 -
Should i Change On Page Optimization ?
Hi, PC monitoring and computer monitoring software are our targeted keywords. Around 5 weeks ago, We created a page for pc monitoring software (home/pc-monitoring-software) and did some bookmarking and guest posts targeting PC monitoring software keyword. Now we are in Top 15 on Google for PC monitoring software keyword . Initially we were thinking to change content of around 2 year old home page to adjust computer monitoring software keyword and do SEO for this keyword. But few days ago, we noticed that our pc-monitoring-software page is already ranking in early fourties for computer monitoring software keyword as well. May be Google is giving advatage of being synonym of PC . Now we are thinking that we should optimize the PC monitoring software page for both computer and PC software keywords like adding "computer monitoring software" in addition to existing "pc monitoring software" in title and similalrly do other on page related work for Computer Mnitoring Software. We are also thinking of doing 301 redirect of existing pc-monitoring-software page to new computer-monitoring-software page which will be optimized both for PC and Computer. Please suggest me if it will help to get good ranking for both PC and Computer Monitoring software if we make above mentioned changes or we should not change the existing pc-monitoring-software page and shall stick to earlier plan of changing the home page to adjust for computer monitoring software.? I'm new to SEO, so want to make wise decision with your help instead of learning with failures. Thanks, shahzad
Technical SEO | | shaz_lhr0 -
On Page 301 redirect for html pages
For php pages youve got Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Technical SEO | | shupester
Header( "Location: http://www.example.com" );
?> Is there anything for html pages? Other then Or is placing this code redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.php in the .htaccess the only way to properly 301 redirect html pages? Thanks!0