Very powerful "trick" to get more visitors over time

Hi

I just wanted to drop a note here.

When starting a forum the main problem you have is that you don't have much content and without content you don't get many visitors from Search engines.

The easiest way to get content on your forum is to create an extra "News" Forum, find a few RSS Feeds about your theme and use the RSS Feature of vBulletin to post these news into your newly created news forum.
Over time this forum will fill up with hundreds and thousands of news posts which get all listed by google & co and bring in new visitors.

Even if you have an established forum and a good load of content already, it never hurts to have more.
Especially not if it is free and constantly fresh

It sounds like a no brainer but I don't see it very often.

A few tips:

Exclude the news forum from New Posts by editing the link to:
domain.com/search.php?do=getnew&exclude=ForumID

Exclude it from "the last X replies" if you use the hack.

Exclude it from newsletters and so on.

USE IT.
Your members wount mind and mostly ignore it, but if the RSS Feeds fit your theme you get tons of new visitors over time

StarBuG

Thanks for sharing.

I'm sure users not familiarized with adding content using the vB RSS importer will appreciate a step-by-step writeup on how to do it.

vBulletin Manual

I think it is explained ok in the vB Manual.
If someone still has problems, he can ask them here of course

Sounds like a good idea

Silly question, how do you find sites with rss feeds?
Are there any better ways of finding them in search engines?

I'm all ears for the idea, but it will need looking into for setting up, unless there is a total planks guide to doing it

Just search around for them. Here's one that came up first on a search for your subject: RSS - Spain, Spanish News, Spain, Expatica

Wouldn't this show as duplicate contents?

RSS feeds normally don't include the full text of the content. Just a snippet and then a link to the original.

I pull in RSS Feeds for Garmin News, TomTom News, and Garmin Software Update notifications on GPS Discussion

Do you have nofollow set up on the links to the external feeds or include them in your white list of external URLs so the news articles have more bearing?

No pint in purposely killing a perfectly good dead forum, without finding out more information

If you picked rss feeds that come from a reliable source and fit your theme then there is no reason for having a rel=nofollow added

Good advice and spot on for building site content.
Just implemented this to my forum and it looks like it will work very well
Thank you very much for the tip

On my sites, I add rel=nofollow to ALL external links anyway.

Be interesting to see how this goes on my forum. Its doubled the posts there in a day. Touch wood it should be a good thing once google does its business

The only content that I've seen indexed by search engines is newsgroup content. The RSS feeds don't get traffic alone from search engines, but they can be useful to spark discussion in some cases.

Great idea, I've just added it now, thanks