Rewriting archives

I noticed from past experiences that archives tend to rank better than real threads (better C2C ratio, usually less clicks required to reach deep threads, etc...)

That lead me to think about the following scenario:

A visitor comes to your forum, if it's a:

1. Guest/bot, then vbSEO shows archives instead of the full thread/forum (with possibly a big REPLY button which leads to the registation/login page)

2. Registered member, the real forum is shown.

I see three advantages to this:

1. Better ranking (Archives with keyword-rich URLs!)
2. Less bandwidth/server load since many features are disabled in archives
3. And possibly it will incite more visitors to register in order to reply/post.

Call me crazy if you want, I like this idea!

What do you think?

@SEOReport:

As long as the SEs could not access the actual threads, duplicate content would be avoided, so this seems like a reasonable scenario.

It would be even better if we could gather statistics on the "stickiness" of archive thread pages vs. normal thread pages. If we were to discover that web visitors have a greater tendency to proceed further into the forum upon reaching a normal thread page (vs. an archive thread page), then it could place forum admins at a disadvantage. That is, the traffic is being generated, but it is not being converted well (in terms of more page views, more registrations, more ad exposure, etc.)

Has any one done any related analysis?

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

@SEOReport:

As long as the SEs could not access the actual threads, duplicate content would be avoided, so this seems like a reasonable scenario.

Has any one done any related analysis?

Not a real & deep analysis, but I've been closely following my logs during the last 6 months, and the sitemap (aka archives) is, by FAR, the most accessed directory.

Generally speaking, on page factors cause the archives pages to rank better than full threads.

It would be even better if we could gather statistics on the "stickiness" of archive thread pages vs. normal thread pages. If we were to discover that web visitors have a greater tendency to proceed further into the forum upon reaching a normal thread page (vs. an archive thread page), then it could place forum admins at a disadvantage. That is, the traffic is being generated, but it is not being converted well (in terms of more page views, more registrations, more ad exposure, etc.)

Good point, convertibility (particularly registration rate) is something I've been thinking about. I have no answer so far, I must analyze my logs again & study registration referals. I suspect one could lower the issue by changing the archive template & adding "quick registration" form in the top, for instance (but it's just a guess)

Generally speaking, on page factors cause the archives pages to rank better than full threads.

If duplicate content is identified, I suspect that the first page encountered by Google would be more likely to avoid a penalty. Since, in vB prior to vBSEO, the archive is easier to crawl than the main forums, it is possible that the popularity of the archive could be partially due to the fact that the archive thread pages are typically encountered before the normal thread pages. Again, another situation in which a deeper analysis is required.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

If duplicate content is identified, I suspect that the first page encountered by Google would be more likely to avoid a penalty.

That's correct, such feature would mostly likely work with new forums, not existing ones.