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Will adding a forum to my site affect SEO?

by Jan79
18 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hey Guys,

I'm currently getting over a 1000 unique visitors a day to my travel website and thought it would be a great idea to add a forum so people can ask questions about holiday destinations so the website is more interactive. It's also a great way to generate content I guess. My site runs on Wordpress and the most popular forum for Wordpress is bbpress I think (let me know if this is the right way to go).

But will having a forum on my site like this: example.com/forum affect my seo and serps of the rest of the site? Would I be better off with a subdomain?

Thx,
Jan.
#adding #affect #forum #seo #site
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Expect a public forum to get hammered with spam, it's guaranteed to happen sooner later. Make sure you have the time to moderate the forum.
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    • Profile picture of the author scottmacair
      Originally Posted by yukon View Post

      Expect a public forum to get hammered with spam, it's guaranteed to happen sooner later. Make sure you have the time to moderate the forum.
      Yukon is right. Take a look at Neil Patel's experience when he included a forum on his site: My Failed Attempt at Content Marketing and What I've Learned
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      • Profile picture of the author yukon
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        Originally Posted by scottmacair View Post

        Yukon is right. Take a look at Neil Patel's experience when he included a forum on his site: My Failed Attempt at Content Marketing and What I’ve Learned
        Thanks, but...

        He also failed at SEO 101 (quote below), never count words because it has nothing to do with ranking pages.

        He's probably a contributing cause to the keyword density clan on this forum.


        Lesson #5: People are inherently lazy

        There is nothing wrong with this as I am inherently lazy too.

        But with user-generated content, it’s hard to get people to add large quantities of high quality text. This caused forum pages to have on average 327 words, which doesn’t help very much with search rankings.

        As I’ve mentioned in the past, Google tends to rank pages with 2,000+ words of content on page 1.
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  • Profile picture of the author SEO-Dave
    I've tried forums on many occasions only later to get sick to death of dealing with the constant barrage of SPAM that the forum software handles poorly, so delete them!

    Used several popular forums scripts and none I've tried made it simple to moderate SPAM. As a WordPress user you'll know how easy it is to moderate comments, add two levels of clicks for each SPAM comment you want to delete and that's my experience of forum moderation, pain in the arse!!!!

    IME for a forum to work you need to dedicate a lot of time to moderation and with social media being used for discussing a lot of stuff, building a successful forum from scratch isn't easy.

    I use WordPress comments as a forum, created a free plugin that's in the WordPress repository that works with any theme: https://wordpress.org/plugins/blog-comments-seo/

    With it comments are indexed in their own right turning a comment discussion into a sort of WordPress powered forum without having to deal with the forum SPAM. WordPress comments get hammered as well with SPAM, but it's far easier to manage.

    David
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  • Profile picture of the author Jan79
    But I was going to have users to have to register to be able to post in the forum. I'm sure this will prevent most of the spam, right?
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    • Profile picture of the author yukon
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      Originally Posted by Jan79 View Post

      But I was going to have users to have to register to be able to post in the forum. I'm sure this will prevent most of the spam, right?
      No, that will never stop spam.

      It's very easy to automate a subscribe/login on a massive scale. Your forum will be 1 in a million of other random free forums that gets hit by automated spam.

      You have to moderate a free forum, there's no way around it.

      If you charged $1 for new forum members you would probably stop 99.99% of the spam, considering it's a travel niche & not a webmaster niche. The downside is fewer legit members doing a signup.

      You could always offer a premium product for that $1 membership (ex: travel guide with a retail value of $20). That would save you from doing a ton of moderation on a free forum. It would also pre-qualify buyer traffic at the same time.
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      • Profile picture of the author Rick Rodd
        Originally Posted by yukon View Post

        No, that will never stop spam.

        It's very easy to automate a subscribe/login on a massive scale. Your forum will be 1 in a million of other random free forums that gets hit by automated spam.

        You have to moderate a free forum, there's no way around it.

        If you charged $1 for new forum members you would probably stop 99.99% of the spam, considering it's a travel niche & not a webmaster niche. The downside is fewer legit members doing a signup.

        You could always offer a premium product for that $1 membership (ex: travel guide with a retail value of $20). That would save you from doing a ton of moderation on a free forum. It would also pre-qualify buyer traffic at the same time.
        Ugh... what he said..he's right you know... lolz
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    • Profile picture of the author ADavisAA
      Originally Posted by Jan79 View Post

      But I was going to have users to have to register to be able to post in the forum. I'm sure this will prevent most of the spam, right?

      It will not stop spam but it can be moderated. You can add IP detecting softwares that will be able to determine if a certain IP have been registering in your website over and over again, but then again, you cannot spam.
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  • Profile picture of the author SEO Power
    It won't really have any effect on your site SEO-wise. The only disadvantage would be the time it will require to keep the forum spam-free as others have said. If you have the time to maintain a forum, it can make your site more useful and help attract more search engine traffic. Doesn't make much difference hosting the forum on a subdomain vs hosting it on a directory.
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  • Profile picture of the author northcave
    Originally Posted by Jan79 View Post

    Hey Guys,

    I'm currently getting over a 1000 unique visitors a day to my travel website and thought it would be a great idea to add a forum so people can ask questions about holiday destinations so the website is more interactive. It's also a great way to generate content I guess. My site runs on Wordpress and the most popular forum for Wordpress is bbpress I think (let me know if this is the right way to go).

    But will having a forum on my site like this: example.com/forum affect my seo and serps of the rest of the site? Would I be better off with a subdomain?

    Thx,
    Jan.
    What is the main reason for the forum? For the visitors or to generate good content for the sake of SEO? If the latter than a blog would be more advisable but in either case I can't see it being damaging.
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  • Profile picture of the author npoint
    The spam is the biggest problem, you will have a lot of work to do every day, the tools like Xrumer, GSA SER and others will provide you flood of spam, but of course if you can handle it and care about quality the forum is fantastic source of traffic , search engines loves them.
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  • Profile picture of the author SEO-Dave
    You'll get tens of thousands of automated registered users just for the backlinks from their profile pages.

    I took my eye of the ball for a few months on one WordPress forum and didn't realise it was being spammed to death until AdSense sent me a warning they were going to ban the domain from AdSense! That was a local travel site as well, just for the seaside town where I live.

    I'll never waste my time building another forum just for SEO reasons, it's a full time job!

    David
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    Freelance SEO Consultant
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  • Profile picture of the author st0nec0ld
    Stick on your site, if you want you can use a blog instead, it is much easier to moderate (especially spam). And you can still get an engagement from people who are seeking for traveling tips.
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  • Profile picture of the author NeedBucksNow
    Doesn't sound like it is worth it. I would just save time and stick to posting to forums, high ranking sites, etc.
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  • Profile picture of the author deepakjha818
    It will be a good idea to have a forum on website, but you have to fight against spammers. To stop spam, put all new account on one day moderation mode and check them manually. If those account are good then approve them to use the forum.
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  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    Like Yukon and others have said. You will get bombarded with never-ending spam. I had a forum on a website once. This was at least 8 years ago. The think got bombarded with spam every day. And that was before the super spammer tools that are out now.

    I would never open a forum just for SEO reasons unless I had a large group of moderators for it to deal with all the spam.

    I just opened a new marketing-related forum, but I did it the only way I would ever consider having a forum. Registrations are closed. Nobody gets in unless I manually enter them in. That is not very practical for most people though, and the whole thing is private so there is no SEO value there.
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  • Profile picture of the author Robert Brown1
    A forum brings you fresh daily content for free that you don’t have to lift a finger to produce. Even while you are sleeping your community members are tapping away at their keyboards conversing, writing articles, arguing, shooting the breeze, etc, producing thousands and thousands of words of content that will bring in other members and contribute to turning your forum into a valued online resource of information.
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  • Profile picture of the author drinstech
    Hi Jan,

    Yes, A forum can affect your SEO if you are unable to do it in a proper way. You need to moderate your forum regularly to keep your forum spam free.
    You may also use a premium forum cms that will effective to keep you forum spam free. It also help to engage readers better as well as generate more revenue.
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