Displaying sub forums

[Lee G]

Is displaying sub forums good or bad for seo

I understand that it gives extra words for the search engines to chew over and help you that way.

The reason Im asking this is at present I have a sprawling forum which displays all the sub forums. By altering how deep the forums are displayed, I will reduce the forum length by about half.

Someones got carried away adding more unused forums

But at the same time by only showing the top level, surely the PR will be spread more evenly, giving better pr to all the main section.

Sorry if I have lost anyone with my ramblings

[Joe Ward]

Which of your forums it the one you think has too many sub-forums?

[Lee G]

I have set it to 0 to the whole board today to tidy the look up a bit.

A lot of the lower areas, the jobs area, sports forums all have about three sections each to them.

Plus the new articles section looks like a mini forum on its own, when you see the size of it. What I originally did with that was to create a divert forum, then hide the forum they are all on.

Which brings me onto another question is how do the search engines view the divert links, ie the top forum say one thing, when you click on it, you get similar worded but not the same worded new forum. Is this classed as word stuffing.

Thanks for the reply and help

[Joe Ward]

You know, this is really a decision that is independent to each forum.

• If you don't list the sub-forums more link value can flow into the main forums, however, you drop your sub-forums 1 level in depth.
• If you keep the sub-forums, then your link value is more equally distributed (less for top level forums), but you do not add depth.

• Before even continuing with a discussion of link value considerations, I would say perform an audit of your forums. If you have so many, chances are there many be many that you do not need. If they are low value, do not generate much traffic, and do not get much user interest, then don't let them still any link value. Find a place to move the threads, and close it down.
• If you have a bunch of really similar or redundant forums, merge them.
• Consider disabling some of the forums for guests. Candidates should be low value content like chit-chat forums that get a lot of low value noise content (i.e. not very good keywords or titles).
• Review your entire template. Try to find links that you can get rid of like the list of users online (for guests), etc. If you can eliminate links that do not need to be there, then you would not have to worry as much about having a higher # of sub-forums visible on forumhome.
• Remember that many niche forums do extremely well having all of their sub-forums on the page. Just try to make sure that you look at the bigger picture for your site, and make sure *everything* is optimized (as discussed above).

I know that is probably a less specific (yes/no) type of response. If I had to be more specific I would say:

• Be sure you have done everything in this tip resource:

Your Site Review - Stuff to Do First

• Then, keep your sub-forums on visible on forumhome.

[Lee G]

Thanks very much for that Joe. A great deal to think about and a lot of very very good advice