Why does vBSEO not use Forum Descriptions?

[Yours Truly]

Well on the FORUMHOME page?

[Joe Ward]

I would have to defer to Juan on this question. However, I can take a good guess.

Most likely since we are a product support forum (and not trying to optimize for ad revenue) we wanted to keep the forum home organized, and less sprawling.

That is, most of our forum titles are self explanatory, and adding descriptions would make it harder for users to quickly scroll to find what they are looking for.

We are more or less optimizing for user friendliness in this case.

If we were an ad driven content site, we would most likely include keyword optimized forum titles and descriptions on the page too.

[Yours Truly]

Ah okay thanks i didn't know if it was to help SEO wise or not

Did notice you have them on the thread display bit

[Joe Ward]

I think for pure SEO purposes, it is better to have them in place. The reason is that a page entirely consisting of "links" only, does not seem like a real "content" page. It's just a links page.

A good content page is dominated by text, and sprinkled with links.

Having the forum description visible allows other keywords to get listed on the site, without having to create separate forums for it.

[Mellow_water]

Thanks for a good question.

[Juan Muriente]

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

I would have to defer to Juan on this question.

It looks cleaner and since our audience is really smart, they don't need the forum descriptions anyways.