Does anyone know the rules or methods for improving SEO of forums?

[GerryWeitz]

After speaking with the Yoast team, they explained that their product cannot support SEO for forums as forum support within Wordpress comes via a plugin and their Wordpress SEO by Yoast plugin cannot support another program.  They said that doing SEO on a forum is really hard.  I believe it.  The tiered hierarchy of forums would seem to make it difficult.

Should I use a direct such as NOINDEX, FOLLOW for the higher level elements of the forum and index just the topic?  I'm really at a loss here.

My website is http://www.heartspm.com and my forum can be seen on the left menu.  Press "Ask A Question."

Thanks in advance.

Gerry

[GerryWeitz]

A delayed thank you, yet a thank you nevertheless for some good recommendations.  My programmer is reviewing the Yoast SEO module and running into these types of issues that Yoast really can't help with.  We have a long list of issues we are addressing.  I'll write more when I know more as to our ultimate solution.  But you present some helpful options.

[My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages]

I would presonaly allow the catagorys to be indexed, but make sure each section had a block of text as an introduction so it's not very thin or near duplicate content.

Then theres making sure no unwanted urls or pages get indexed. The search pages, user pages e.t.c might take some looking into to make sure your not egnerating 1000s of duplicate pages.

And it's just a quirk, but the url's read weirdly with forum.php in them. Rewriting them to just /forum/ might make them a little more usable.. Not entirly sure you will get SEO benifit out of it though.