Forum software penalties
-
I'm hoping to solicit some feedback on what people feel would be SEO best practices for message board/forum software. Specifically, while message boards that are healthy can generate tons of unique content, they also can generate a fair share of thin content pages.
These pages include...
- Calendar pages that can have a page for each day of each month for 10 years! (thats like 3650 pages of just links).
- User Profile pages, which depending on your setup can tend to be thin. The board I work with has 20k registered members, hence 20k user profile pages.
- User lists which can have several hundred pages.
I believe Google is pretty good at understanding what is message board content, but there is still a good chance that one could be penalized for these harmless pages. Do people feel that the above pages should be noindexed?
Another issue is that of unrelated content. Many forums have their off-topic areas (the Pub or Hangout or whatever). On our forum up to 40% of the content is off-topic (when I say content I mean number of post versus raw word count).
What are the advantages and disadvantages of such content? On one hand they expand the keywords you can rank for. On the other hand it might generate google organic traffic which you might now want because of a high bounce rate.
Does too much indexable content that is unique dilute your good content?
-
If you a bit of it on a well established site with many highly trusted links, It may have a postive effect. If you did lots of it on a brand new site, It may do more harm than good.
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
-
Google ranking penalty: Limited to specific pages or complete website?
Hi all, Let's say few pages on the website dropped in the rankings due to poor optimisation of the pages or hit by algo updates. Does Google limits the ranking drop only to these pages or the entire website will have any impact? I mean will this cause ranking drop to the homepage for primary keyword? Will Google pose the penalty to other pages in the website if few pages drop in the rankings. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Software to indicate search volumes/trends
Is there any software that exists to help provide an indication of the search volumes or trends behind keywords? Currently we use google trends for a YOY and WOW view for some select KW's but the reality is are search volumes are effected by 1,000's of KW's and trying to get an accurate view of overall trends and theme with our product sector is difficult. I'm interested to find out if there is software which is an alternative to google trends or if there is 3rd party software available that lets us process google trends data in bulk?
Algorithm Updates | | SEO-SMB0 -
Ranking Software
Hello Can anyone recommend the best rankings/tracking software - something that will track upto position 500 in the serps. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | webguru20140 -
Can I only submit a reconsideration request if I have a penalty?
Hey guys, One of the sites I'm looking after took a hit with their rankings (particularly for one keyword that went from 6/7 to 50+) post-Penguin in May. Although, after cleaning-up the link profile somewhat we started to see some slow and steady progression in positions. The keyword that dropped to 50+ was moving upwards in advance of 20. However, a couple of weeks back, the keyword in question took another slide towards 35-40. I therefore wondered whether it would be best to submit a reconsideration request - even though the site did not receive a manual penalty. The website has a DA of 40 which more than matches a lot of the competitor websites that are ranking on first page for the aforementioned keyword. At this stage, I would have expected the site to have returned to its original ranking - four-and-a-half months after Penguin - but it hasn't. So a reconsideration request seemed logical. That said, when I came to go through the process on Webmaster Tools I was unable to find the option! Has it now been removed for sites that don't receive manual penalties?
Algorithm Updates | | Webrevolve1 -
[G Penalty?] Significant Traffic Drop From All Sources
My client's traffic started to significantly decrease around Nov 21 (Panda update 22). This includes traffic from all sources - search engines (G, B, & Y!), direct, AND referral. At first we thought it was a G penalty but G answered our reconsideration request by stating that no manual penalty had occured. It could be algo penalty, but again, the site has been hit across all sources. Client has done zero backlinking - it is all natural. No Spam, etc.. All of his on-site SEO is perfect (700+ pages indexed, all unique content, unique title and desc). On Oct 16, he switched from his old URL to a new URL and did proper redirects. (Last year - Dec 2011 - he switched his CMS to Drupal and although there was a temporary decrease in traffic, it showed recovery within a month or so.) He does zero social on his site and he has many ads above the fold. Nevertheless, the traffic decrease is not source specific. In other words, all sources have decreased since Nov 21, 2012 and have not recovered. What is going on? What can be the explanation for decrease in traffic across all sources? This would be easy to answer if it was only Google Organic decrease but since direct and referral have also been hit, we cannot locate the problem. Please share your personal experiences as well as advice on where we should look. Could this be negative SEO? Where would we look? ANY ADVICE IS WELCOME !!!! Every bit counts Thanks!!
Algorithm Updates | | GreenPush0 -
How to deal with EMD penalty?
After some research I would say my site have been hit by an EMD penalty, it seems many other people have faced the same. It would be very useful to know how to deal with this, many topics discuss the reasons behind it, but few have a realistic response for fast action. I am in two minds - one would be to try and improve content etc, but this is subjective and could take any amount of time, or never resolve the issue. The other would be to move the content to a new URL, which poses the question, should I do a 301 redirect, or would this just transfer the penalty? If no redirect, then I am proposing starting fresh - as the sites hit by EMD penalties are deemed 'low quality' this might be the fastest way to recovery. If I move the old content to my established main site as a sub folder, would this cause any problems? Many thanks for people responses.
Algorithm Updates | | Quime1 -
Title Tags and Over Optimization Penalty
In the past, it was always a good thing to put your most important keyword or phrase at the beginning of the Title Tag with the company name at the end. Now according to the over optimization penalty in the Whiteboard Friday video, it seems to be better to be more human and put the company name at the beginning with the keyword or phrase following. Am I understanding this correctly?
Algorithm Updates | | hfranz0 -
Is this a possible Google penalty scenario?
In January we were banned from Google due to duplicate websites because of a server configuration error by our previous webmaster. Around 100 of our previously inactive domain names were defaulted to the directory of our company website during a server migration, thus showing the exact same site 100 times... obviously Google was not game and banned us. At the end of February we were allowed back into the SERPS after fixing the issue and have since steadily regained long-tail keyword phrase rankings, but in Google are still missing our main keyword phrase. This keyword phrase brings in the bulk of our best traffic, so obviously it's an issue. We've been unable to get above position 21 for this keyword, but in Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex (Russian SE) we're positions 3, 3, and 7 respectively. It seems to me there has to be a penalty in effect, as this keyword gets between 10 and 100 times as much traffic in Google than any of the ones we're ranked for, what do you think? EDIT: I should mention in the 4-5 years prior to the banning we had been ranked between 15 and 4th in Google, 80% of the time on the first page.
Algorithm Updates | | ACann0