Difference forum and QA

[turnon]

I read the post about question and answer on your blog

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-reasons-why-qa-sites-can-boost-your-seo-in-2011-despite-googles-farmer-update-12160

What is from SEO view the difference between a forum and QA ?

Jan

[Goetzman]

Agreed, This is like Yahoo answers, old Google answers, or Amazon's askville.

[baptisteplace]

A good Q&A will have only one answer (editorial content) or have several ways to make the question and the answer have a good quality (content and SEO). This is done with moderation or social features (best answers, etc.). Content is targeted and under control.

A forum will be much more free, their is no best answer put in the first page just after the question, the topic may not be a question too, you can have very various contents. Also, forums have some very difficult SEO problems with duplicate content, empty pages and more.

[perfectweb]

Q&A sites tend to be more SEO friendly because of things like "related questions", "tag clouds" etc.

They tend to work more like blogs with comments rather than forums.

As the articel suggests, more people are searching using questions nowadays - e.g. "where can i get an iphone" as opposed to "buy iphone". Q&A sites lend themselves to ranking highly for this type of query.

The article also suggests, and I'm inclined to agree, that Google likes to show content from different data sources in it's top positions. Given the web trends towards Q&A sites, my personal views is that Google are more likely to rank a Q&A site higher than a forum (given all things are equal).