Optimizing Forums

[jac.reyes]

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.

[MattRoney]

Hi Jac!

Are you concerned about the category pages themselves being indexed? If not, you can block crawlers from accessing them with robots.txt. You might even try adding "noindex, follow" to them, to ensure crawlers move through their links without indexing the "duplicate" content.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I think a lot with this is going to come down to what is powering the forums.

That said, looking at one of your pages: http://violintutorpro.com/topic/shoulder-rest-search/, it has a friendly URL & the page Title is what you would expect it to be. Also, the page is indexed.

The page isn't set to noindex and I don't see anything else that would concern me. From here, it's going to be about building up trust and, ideally, links as well.

-Andy