archive/trash forum

[X7N]

Hey all.

I had a question, which is SEO related.

First, how many people have a achieve or trash forum? Meaning, you move old threads to the achieve forum or move spam posts to your trash forum?

SEO related is this a good idea? Say you have a thread, which no one posts in anymore and it's old. Is it better to create an achieve forum and move threads there? Or should you keep the thread in the original forum it's in eg. Offtopic

I hope what I'm trying to say is clear?

[Joe Ward]

I think you should move new posts quickly to whichever sub-forum they are relevant to.

However, I think some pruning over time "can" be appropriate in some circumstances. Individual posts with nonsense content such as "That's great..." done just to get a signature link would be good examples. That is actual pruning within the thread itself.

With your long tail, any thread can eventually deliver hits, so you would not want to move it around, even if it's no longer active.

[X7N]

So in other words. If I have a thread, which has been in a certain forum category for 2-5 weeks SHOULD stay in that forum. It wouldn't be a whole lot great to move to it to an archive forum?

Lately, what I've done is I've stopped moving threads to the archive forum and have left it in the certain forum it's in eg. offtopic, entertainment etc.. However, in the past a few years ago, BEFORE we used vBSEO. We used to move old/closed threads to our archieve forum.

I was thinking about getting rid of the archive forumand/or moving the threads to the categories they used to be in before.

[Joe Ward]

• Well, it depends on your configuration and your strategy!
• If you setup up your URLs so that they are categorized in the sub forum, then there is a hierarchical structure in place that will change if you move it.
• This thread is filed under /f2/ here. It could have also been setup as /f2-general-discussion/ or something similar.
• If we move it out into an archive forum (let's say it's /f999/) then it moves to a new position within the hierarchy.
• If you don't include the sub-forum in the thread URL, then the hierarchical structure of the URL would not change. This thread would be:
• vbseo.com/achieve-trash-forum-30857/
• Whether it's in this forum (/f2/) or in the trash forum (/f999).
• The onpage information would change in either case. Since the nav bits change indicate the name of the forum in which they are filed, this changes the meaning of the page.
• The overall effect of this could be significant depending on how your template is setup. Do you emphasize the sub-forum name or description in your Relevant Replacements for example? If so, then your AdSense ads could change in some degree perhaps changing the accuracy/relevance of the ads, and thereby impacting the clickthrough rate (possibly).
• There is also a "depth" scenario to consider:
• The more threads you add to a sub-forum, the more pages of threads are created. Likewise, each new thread pushes older threads down the list and eventually onto deeper and deeper pages unless they are topped.
• The deeper they get buried, the more levels of linking the search engines have to crawl in order to discover the threads.
• Now, by removing (pruning or filing in a new sub-forum) you actually reduce the number of threads filed in the sub-forum, and this has the reverse effect of moving old threads from deeper into the pagination, to shallower (less links to discover them for the search engines).
• That would be a good side effect, and as multiple pages worth of threads are removed, this could be significant.
• If you are moving them to an archive forum that is still available to the search engines, then this forum actually grows in depth faster, having the reverse effect for the moved threads.
• If you were to do this strategy, it would be preferable not to move valuable threads jsut because they are no longer receiving "posts". Instead, it would be better to move posts that have low quality content, bad titles, which never received many views or follow-up posts. These would be sacrificial and could be moved in order to help the higher quality threads maintain their shallow depth in their original sub-forum, and gain a possible SEO advantage as a result.

[briansol]

I would never move anything "good" out of its current forum. The idea of an archive is a bad idea IMO, especially if it involves changing the url.

Trash, i do i have a subfolder in my admin/mod area, so that it doesn't rank and i periodically prune all threads in there.