Few Quick Tips for mid sized forums

[pelican]

isnt having lesser thread / post per page is better? since it will means more pages and google will have more pages to eat... more pages will be indexed...

[dethfire]

isnt having lesser thread / post per page is better? since it will means more pages and google will have more pages to eat... more pages will be indexed...

content is king, not quantity

[hum1]

Can anyone tell me how to generate the sitemap and display it in the footer?

[pelican]

vBSEO Site Map

vBSEO Google/Yahoo Sitemap Generator for vBulletin 3.6.x, 3.5.x & 3.0.x - vBulletin.org Forum

[len backus]

Pleaase explain why Google likes longer pages with more posts per page?

I run banner ads that are CPM paid. I changed to shorter number of posts some time back to pump up my page views and therefor ad impression count.

[len backus]

May I ask again for an answer to my question, please?

Wouldn't keyword density also be higher with fewer threads/posts per page?

[Joe Ward]

Pleaase explain why Google likes longer pages with more posts per page?

I run banner ads that are CPM paid. I changed to shorter number of posts some time back to pump up my page views and therefor ad impression count.

That is a good observation about trade off.

The long tail effect is not just about having a large # of pages to generate traffic, but also a large # of "more valuable" pages.

It could be argued that (for the majority of threads) the most substantial content will occur on page 1. Specifically the (a) posting of information such as an article, or (b) posting of a question leading to quick informative responses; will dominate best keywords to page 1 in many cases.

If the extra pages have lower value content, then they will make the crawling/indexing/ranking *less effective*, but will not provide much more keyword coverage.

You will often see threads get stretched into multiple pages by thank-you notices, repeat questions, or lower value additional info. Imagine a thread that goes to page 2 when someone posts "Thank-you". Obviously this has very, very, very low value and is almost entirely assured to never deliver any traffic despite consuming a little of the link value flowing through your site.

Understanding Google PageRank Versus Pure "Link Value" - vBulletin SEO Forums

So considering that you have "link value" flowing through your site which can flow more heavily with less pages, setting your posts per page/threads per page setting higher results in a form of page count pruning. You do not lose the content (i.e. keywords included in the thread)... you just break it up over a small # of pages.

Note: I'm also in favor of actually physical removing low value follow-up posts (like "thank-yous") over time. That is, after such time as it will not interrupt the *current* discussion. If 3 months passes and the thread is no longer active, that might be a suitable time to get rid of the "low value entries".

A lower # of posts per page (for long threads) also pushes content deeper down into the hierarchy. Therefore, even if the thread DOES contain valuable keywords down deeper into the pages, the search engines have to dig down really deep to find it.

More posts per page, allows search engines to find new keywords with less crawling depth.

You've reduced your posts/page in order to boost CPM. How much of a boost in CPM did you actually get by doing that?

It is possible that over time your CPM is actually going to sacrifice long term impression growth (through SEO) for a short-term boost in impressions (via less posts/page).

Can you generate any long tail stats for the 60 days prior to the change, and for the 60 days after to see if Google started sending you traffic for more or less terms after the change?

[StarBuG]

I just reduced my post per pages count from 15 to 6 to improve PIs.

My forum has a very high amount of new visitors (87% new users/day) which is not typical for a forum.
With that comes that despite high unique users numbers I have relatively low page impressions.
Because of the nature of my forum (medical personal answering questions from patients) people read most threads completely.

I don't think it will have a negative impact on my forum.
We'll see

StarBuG

[azbryanw]

Just upped mine....I'll comment back and let you know if it works