Suggestion: make a special sitemap for sticky threads and important topics

[dutchbb]

On forums like ours with over 1.000.000 posts and 1500-2000 posts /day, it doesn't make mutch sence to focus on PR for each and every thread and post. It's hard enough to get PR for a static, well linked, and important page, let alone for so many 'not so important' ones on such a dynamic forum.

That's why I disabled the "search for similar posts" and focus on PR for the forumdisplay pages with the search engine friendly forum jump menu I "invented". See our footer: Dutch Bodybuilding.com Forum - Fitness Bodybuilding & Bodybuilders, dieet, afvallen & supplementen It's basically just all the forum links with the best keywords for title, but instead of a drop down, just a simple text link.

But what about all the sticky threads and other important, high quality content pages on our forum? It would make sence to place those in the footer as well, but that would make it a little cluttered after a while.

So my suggestion is: make a special sitemap, just for all the sticky threads, and the threads you, as an admin, think are important and should get the most PR.

Let's say we call this /sitemap2/, we send that URL with the vbSEO google sitemap creator and give it the highest priority for crawling.

We have done 2 things here: extra links to your quality and keyword rich content + showing we have 2 sitemaps, making google think the site is big (from what I 've read from SEO experts it should help).

[Joe Ward]

That's a very interesting idea. In fact, I really like this idea. I'll see what the team thinks.

[Mert Gökçeimam]

This is really a great idea. I also like to assign importance to some of my forums which i need higher page rank also.

[Michael]

I think it is a little excessive to create a seperate sitemap just for stickied and pre-selected threads, i'd rather just have these threads assigned a greater ranking (such as 0.2 greater than normal) than normal threads in the same sitemap. Since Google will treat both the sitemaps the same unless they have a different ranking, and if that is the only differentiator then why not stick both collections together.

[dutchbb]

I understand what you're saying, however for me it's not about the crawling priority for the topics alone. If you get a PR on the /sitemap2/ page of about the same as the board (let's say 4) then every sticky and topic listed in that sitemap get's PR3 from that page, just like if it where forums on you board! This is because the fewer links on the page and the closer to the homepage, the more PR for every link.

If your sticky was just in forumdisplay with no other backlinks, it would get (4 - 1 for forumdisplay -1 for link on forumdisplay) so no more than PR1) This isn't always the case, but i've seen is happen on many of the bigger boards.

On a normal sitemap in vBulletin we're talking thousands of links, you can't get any good PR for those, and your good content is "lost in the mass".

So the goal is getting the highest possible PR for your quality content in relation to your less quality content. Hope this makes sence. Thanks for the input guys.

[Joe Ward]

Michael - I think we're all thinking of different features. I thought he meant the "Footer Archive Links" feature in vbseocp.php.

[rob]

I thought he meant a dedicated page linked into the archives.

[dutchbb]

Sorry I call my archive page /sitemap/ because it works like a sitemap, so I meant like a second archive page , just for sticky's and special topics.

It could be included in the archive, but that would again make it to cluttered and you would have too many links on one page.

[dutchbb]

Example of my new sticky topics & articles sitemap: Sticky Topics & Articles Sitemap - DutchBodybuilding.com Forums

This is linked on the homepage and forumhome, as you can see the focus is on sticky topics, giving them mutch better crawling/ PR.

The two sitemaps are also linked together. This is all done manually, but a hack/plugin could automate it.

[dutchbb]

Ok now after the Google pr update, I can say this has helped a lot.

I've tested this by including most of the sticky topics in the stickies sitemap, and left some of them out to see the difference.

Notice here at the bottom some of the sticky's have no link: Sticky Topics & Articles Sitemap - DutchBodybuilding.com Forums

Now check those topics for pr:
Groot film kritiek & review topic
Het grote FTD/van-nieuwsgroepen-downloaden uitleg topic

Now look at some topics that do have a link in the stickies sitemap and notice higher pr:
Tips en tricks over voeding en diëten!
Is dit een goed voedingsschema?